


Sympathy for the Devil

by wishwellingtons



Category: Thick of It (UK)
Genre: Brighton - Freeform, Cancer, Canonical Character Death, Deus Ex Machina, F/F, F/M, Islamophobia, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Racism, Series 3 + Jamie, Swearing, Violence, multiple character deaths, party conferences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:41:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malcolm gets cancer and doesn't want Jamie - or anybody else - to know. Racism is on the rise in Britain. The PM's almost entirely witless. Sir Julius Nicholson is in want of a wife.</p><p>WARNINGS: contains multiple character deaths over the course of the fic (not necessarily from cancer), do PM me for further details. For all that it's quite funny. </p><p>This fic is compliant with canon up to series 3, except that Jamie is there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Men of wealth and taste.

Jamie thinks it starts when Malcolm goes out at one o'clock in the morning, comes home at two and is violently sick in the loo. In fact, it starts two weeks earlier, when Malcolm is at the doctor's for an hour, then instructs Sam to clear every Wednesday and Friday morning for as long as possible. He doesn't explain to her until he starts to show the effects of treatment.  
  
From the start, Malcolm has only one intention: keep it a secret. Jamie is a fan of secrets, in their proper places - such as E:/ drives and .jpegs and .pdf duplicates for the _Sun_. Malcolm - and Malcolm's body - are not suitable venues for secrets. Especially if - as Jamie automatically assumes - the secret is regarding who has access to said body, and when.  
  
Jamie is a psychotic genius but he's also very thick on some matters. Like Malcolm, whom - with the honourable exception of his daughters - he has always loved more than anything in the world.  
  
\----  
INT. MALCOLM'S HOUSE (NIGHT)  
  
"Right," says Jamie, bursting through the door like an odd cross between the wrath of God and a Glaswegian welder about to batter his lover to death. Malcolm's not interested enough to find out which. "We're going to have a little fucking discussion."  
  
Malcolm keeps staring at the screen. He's watching News 24 with subtitles and the sound muted, which at any other time would be fucking worrying, given that Malcolm despises subtitles for their incompleteness and thinks that muted-TV watching is the province of sad, tower block agoraphobics sitting in their own piss, and lesbians.1 Jamie, however, brings not an attention span but a flaming sword of retribution, cunningly disguised as a Filofax and the effects of six beers.  
  
"Now, I'm giving you every opportunity to tell me," he bellows, slamming the door, dropping his coat and beginning to range round the room like a heat-seaking missile, or alternatively, a rider on the wall of death. After a few seconds, he starts opening cupboards, then Malcolm's kitchen drawers, "and I'm prepared to be reasonable. If you're fucking _Nick Hanway_ , I will gouge out only _one_ ae his eyes, using this skewer. If it's Dan Miller, I will only walnut-cracker one - one - of his testicles, before tying him in front of YOUR VHS - VHS, you fucking disgust me - of Mao Tse Tung documentaries - for all eterntiy. If it's Julius Bumrape Nicholson, that shit in a pillowcase, I will personally remove his shiny, balded head from his shoulders, and force you to eat the contents before setting fire to the pair of you. I will sell your ashes for cat litter. A lifetime of violent anal rape will be preferable to everything I'll do if it's Julius."  
  
Malcolm doesn't move. He looks like he might have been sick again.  
  
About ten minutes further into the discussion, which is not a discussion but Jamie hurling abuse, threats, and thinly-disguised panic at the still, odd-coloured man sitting motionless in the chair, Malcolm will turn his head, which is looking suddenly smaller, sparer, more like the bones beneath, and say (with lips that are cracked, which Jamie has not kissed in days), "I wish to God it _was_ Julius."  
  
Jamie will howl and throw crockery and they'll nearly get into a fight except for the first time, Malcolm doesn't want it. Not the row, but the violence. He curls around his own body, protective of this strange collection of muscles and bones, venom doubled like he suddenly has something to shield. Jamie gets the feeling he's not meant to notice, but he does. And Jamie's like an animal, not _good_ with sickness or with death, and so although he doesn't know what he's smelling, when he gets too close to Malcolm, something in his stomach pushes and turns over. Instinct is telling him to get away.  
  
Cold heaviness is settling in his stomach, trickling down until it's approximately the weight of his relationship with Malcolm, and Jamie  _still_ doesn't know what, but there's cold brushing over his skin too. It makes Jamie - which is even more unusual - want to keep  _still_. Malcolm just sits there on the sofa, either like he's very tired or very angry, and the thing is that there's always an ongoing list of things Jamie's done which Malcolm could legitimately kill him for. Some (many) Jamie doesn't even remember enacting, but they're always _plausible_ (and frequently _provable,_ thanks to a surveillance culture and the prevalence of digital film -- a stimulating complication to Malcolm's theatre when he sorts everything out).  
  
  
"I need a fucking drink," he says eventually, and Malcolm shrugs a shoulder as if telling him to get on with it. Which Jamie does.  
  
In the kitchen, open-plan, Jamie goes for Malcolm's best Scotch in the hopes of a recognisable flicker of fury, but when he comes back, Malcolm's asleep, head hanging back, mouth still. His arm is still stretched along that of the sofa, and Jamie notices he's taken off his ring. The whisky's strong and Jamie's unused to effectively drinking _alone_ (to drinking alone in Malcolm's _presence_ ) and some benighted instinct of fuck-knows-what says to get Malcolm up those stairs if he can.  
  
So he does. Malcolm shuffles up like an old drunk on the banks of the Clyde, the tiny calor-gas flicker of strength propelling him past the stairs and towards the bed. He doesn't get undressed or acknowledge Jamie's kiss on the back of his neck, but when Jamie (one draught above heat) lies down beside him, Malcolm rolls towards him in solidarity and falls asleep against him without saying a word. Jamie's never slept entirely wrapped round another human being, and, if I'm honest with you, after tonight he never does it again.  
  
  
\----  
  
Jamie is less stupid than might be supposed. Which is a problem. Minute obsession with Jamie since Day 1 of the improbable fucker's improbable working life should have warned Malcolm, but apparently Jamie's less brain-damaged and more tenacious that he'd bargained for.   
  
Apparently, Malcolm's lethargy cannot be masked by doubling his caffeine intake (which isn't plausible anyway, he can't control the choking heart of Britain if he constantly needs to piss), and instead of interpreting this sudden sexual famine as evidence of a faster, sleeker, _better_ young lover, Jamie's starting trying to check Malcolm's pulse and now gives him weird looks instead of watching News 24. Either the fucker's supremely arrogant about his fucking (which... Malcolm would let Terri Coverley sit on his face before admitting it, but if Malcolm ever fucks anyone instead of Jamie, it'll be because he's had to hand Jamie over to the FBI), or Malcolm's looking a lot shittier than previously supposed.  
  
Malcolm _is_ looking a lot shittier than he'd previously supposed.  
  
This means upping the ante. Malcolm thinks back to the row of three nights before, the one where he'd been struggling to stay conscious and Jamie'd been reeling off ways to fit punishment to crime. Jamie _cannot_ know, and thus Malcolm must choose a candidate for seduction so outrageous as to blur the delicate edges of Jamie's sanity, and cause a black hole of logic-free violence to explode in the area between Jamie's scalp and the top of his neck.  
  
Obviously, there is only one candidate.  
  
He didn't say he wasn't fucking Julius. Jamie may have _heard_ him say it, but that doesn't mean it _happened_.  
  
\----  
  
"You can tell me, you know," says Jamie, when Malcolm refuses a drink for the seventh night running. "Is it AA?"  
  
"It'll be HM fucking Broadmoor if you ask me another stupid question."  
  
"If you're fucking someone - aye, you _said_ you weren't -- "  
  
"He's got nine inches and a fucking six-pack and his name's Nicolas Sarkozy, are you happy now?"  
  
\----  
INT. MALCOLM'S OFFICE (DAY. LUNCHTIME. EXACTLY FIVE MINUTES BEFORE THE GREAT GRAND PLAN)  
  
Sam clearly disapproves of the plan. It is a great plan, and also one which Malcolm has not articulated directly: however, she's unnervingly fucking Sphinxlike at the best of times.  
  
Malcolm's dispatched her to do filing (Sam never has anything  _real_ to file, because Malcolm's terrified of _paper trails_ ) , with instructions to stall Jamie and get him into the room no sooner and no later than five minutes from now. He has also accidentally-on-purpose awkwardly cancelled one of their weekly "sit in the office and laugh at fat Tories" sessions, usually sacrosanct. And he's changed into a pale blue tie and told Julius to come and share some Jaffa cakes on an issue of important State Business.  
  
Malcolm arranges himself against the new blue abstract painting he had delivered on approval that morning, positions the Jaffa cakes on the table, and manages to distract himself from the issue of which rentboys-Jaguars-Piers-Gaveston2 scandal to leak next, long enough to straighten up and assume the slightly devilish smile that seems to work well on Julius. His head is pounding. He must also remember to purr.  
  
He _does_ purr, consistently, for a full three-and-a-half minutes of meaningless conversation, none of which Julius follows, and which accelerates rapidly towards disbelief and disaster for all concerned when Malcolm hears the low rumble of through-the-wall chaos that means Jamie's arrived. Sam may _fucking disapprove_ of his unholy plan, but she'll have executed it brilliantly - the slightly panicky phonecall, the urgent confirmation that Mr. Macdonald does _know_ his meeting with Mr. Tucker's been cancelled, because Lord Nicholson is -- "  &c, &c, records Malcolm's mind, watching Julius's smooth, shiny face go from suspicion, to disbelief, to something that's _actually hope_.  
  
Jamie gets past Sam sooner than Malcolm expected. He can hear their argument.   
  
Sam, bless her, is letting her best Roedean3 tones rise higher and higher, as if Jamie's brand of foghorn psycho wasn't enough to penetrate walls. This doesn't give Malcolm a lot of time, but in a very real sense, he's already had two years: so he grabs Julius's tie, says nine words that would be unprintable and unbelievable in any form of reputable media, yanks hard and smashes their mouths together.  
  
Julius smells of lavender, one of the few scents that doesn't make Malcolm want to throw up. The Baron Arnage copes surprisingly well with the unexpected assault of a carcinogenic vampire, and it's Malcolm's first time kissing someone who's taller than him,4 so even if it's just for policy it's certainly informative. In fact, the whole thing's far more fucking enjoyable than he expected, even if Julius does taste like a children's fucking _party bag_ and does tend to press Malcolm back against the desk in a way that - were he in full possession of his faculties and not doing this _purely_ 5 to mindfuck Jamie - Malcolm would not hesitate to let him know was _unacceptable._  
  
Jamie bounces the two-hundred-year-old door on its hinges6 and physically extracts Julius from Malcolm's bodily space. He does this with one hand on Julius's tie and another in his non-existent hair, and yet Malcolm would swear he sees Julius leave the ground. Five hundred inches smaller than Julius - and indeed, than the average domestic cat - Jamie then throws Julius through the door, out the door, and into the atrium with a strangulated instruction to run away like the fucking kid in the fucking _Lion King_ (Jamie's daughters are just that age), or he, Jamie, will drill through Julius's bald skull with a pencil and a horsecock, and not stop drilling until he's effected a complete chemical castration from the inside out. Then he slams the door so hard it bows, charges back in, places one hand at Malcolm's throat and keeps walking until Malcolm's backed against the wall.  
  
"Julius Nicholson. Julius _fucking_ Nicholson. The most boring baldy cunt in all of tightarsed pokerwashed England - you could have fucking anyone, and you decide to fuck a fucking English priss who folds his underwear and probably apologises before he comes. And you decide to cheat - "  
  
" - oh pull the other one, I'm not your fucking boyfriend. Not only would that be very politically fucking _inexpedient,_ but I'd hate to be seen with you. I just got tired of getting pounded by a sad little bead-rattling povvo with his mother's surname and his father's enormous, hairy - " He nearly pulls it off, but this is Jamie: Malcolm's voice is full of bile, but he's breathing audibly, and his eyes are much too watchful.  
  
" - what the FUCK is wrong with you?" Jamie asks, shaking Malcolm sharply, and pressing his face close to Malcolm's. "You'd never - you'll the coathanger'd fucking _worked_ , you mutant fucking Gorbals - "  
  
Malcolm's got his next line all ready, an angry rejoinder that at least his da hadn't _paid_ \- but then he suddenly retches, three inches from Jamie's face. His mouth is already filling. He manages "Christ, what have you been _eating_?" with a sudden wince of what looks like fear, but it's incoherent: desperation and realisation make him push Jamie away, career past him and bend double in front of the waste-paper basket. He is sick, and sick, no small effort on an empty stomach and one which requires a redoubling of his coughing and heaves every time he tries.  
  
The sound is unmistakable, but even if Malcolm vomited in some way peculiar to himself, in the past four weeks, Sam's heard it often enough to be through the door, locking it, and at his desk in under a minute.  
  
It's Jamie who loves him; it's _Sam_ who has the sense to move and find the television remote, switching it on and keeping her thumb on +Volume until it's up to screaming pitch (the exact volume needed to muffle Malcolm's retching and Jamie's panic). It's Sam whose hand Malcolm's holds, twisting round her thin fingers in a manacling grip, not because it's comfort but because he's bracing himself: he won't drop to all fours in front of Jamie.  
  
Malcolm's not aware of anything any more, except for that redoubling pain in his stomach and chest, and thus cannot distinguish Jamie's incessant questioning of Sam until the impulse to vomit recedes for longer than a few seconds.  
  
"It's your fucking onions, fucking _balogna_ , god you disgust me," he shouts, over his shoulder, and Sam is forced to participate in the awful spectacle of Jamie denying it and Malcolm insisting, the latter unable to get back up and the former apparently unable to move.  
  
"It's not the fucking onions, it's - "  
  
"It's a fucking allergy. Wheat. Tom - fuck - tomato. Being in the - _fuckfuckfuck_."  
  
"There's no fucking allergy that - " Jamie looks desperate, panicked like a little kid. "Sam, make him -- Malcolm," he stops, and never has Sam (or Malcolm, she would guess) heard that dangerous voice come so close to pleading. "Sit down. Come here."  
  
Another heave, the really nasty sort, while what's left of Malcolm's throat rattles, unlubricated to the dry gullet, and his diaphragm gives him a few more sickening kicks. The pain is so bad he can't speak. When he does it's a wheeze. "Maybe it's just a result of being in the same room with you."  
  
Malcolm's hand is still clinging hard to Sam's and the pressure is beginning to hurt her. She doesn't know if she can keep holding him up. There's sick on the floor beside the bin and although she can see to it that nobody, ever, has to know outside this room, between this fastidious man and his stupid deranged lover and the wish that Malcolm could, for once, behave like someone else, she'd like to sit down and have a good cry. Jamie rounds on her.  
  
"You fucking tell me what's going on."  
  
Jerking upwards as if this was the signal he needed, Malcolm (still bent at an impossible angle, looking like he's been poisoned or shot) waves Jamie away and tries to put himself between them. He looks so awful that for a second, Jamie and Sam actually forget what they've been talking about. His mouth has cracked round the edges. His head is so red it looks like he might burst.  
  
"Leave her alone. Sam, don't talk to him."  
  
"Oh, talk to him Sam, fucking talk to him, tell him _exactly_ what you know - you told this -- " Jamie never gets to finish whatever terrible insult he had planned, because Malcolm, face distorted with agony, suddenly snaps out of it to hiss "Take that fucking tone with her again, and I will _destroy_ you."  
  
It would be an arcane and faintly comical threat, except Malcolm is doubled over in agony again, and Sam can imagine him doing it. Jamie, to do him credit, takes a step forward and (being snarled away), abandons the project of interrogating Sam altogether, plunging over to the doorframe (Malcolm seems to right himself) and trying another tack.  
  
"Or maybe I should get Nicholson in, ask him what _he_ \- "  
  
"Yes, christ, by all means, get Nicholson," Malcolm sneers, holding his side and (having released Sam's hand) using his spare fingers to inch his way on the edge of his desk. He's trying to advance on Jamie, but Sam has no idea what he'll do when he runs out of desk. "He'll tell you I'm just a bit tired from the mammoth fuckathon we had last night, while you were out clearing up the DoSAC shitastrophe, and I was sitting on his fucking dick." For once in his life Jamie's just gone silent, because (like Sam), he's watching Malcolm's hand twitch like a white tarantula along the sharp edge of the desk, and it seems he's got the same idea as Sam: that when Malcolm runs out of desk, disaster will strike. It's all much too fast to do anything about.  
  
His eyes have turned into twin deathstars, and his lips are roughly the colour of the bile in the basket, and when he does fall (which he does suddenly and without any grace), Jamie and Sam are a second too late to get there. Malcolm hits his head on the desk as he goes, so there's just a comforting blackness and he doesn't remember anything, but Sam has to live through the bit where Jamie makes a noise like a hunted animal, and so accordingly, she is not so lucky.  
  
Twenty minutes later, and nobody except Malcolm can believe it was _Sam_ , Downing Street's nominal representative of humanity, who'd stopped Jamie phoning for an ambulance. It was Sam who threw Jamie's Blackberry at the wall so hard it shattered, and Sam who clamped her own hand over Malcolm's office handset and told Jamie (admittedly with unravelling mascara, because they'd undone Malcolm's shirt and put him on the sofa, and he just looked so _small_ ) he'd have to break her wrist if he wanted to prise it off. And then, she'd spat, vipuerative enough to have warmed Malcolm's heart, could he have seen her, she'd tell the press about - well, about the first three things that came into her head. The pictures, the drugs, and that he'd tried to rape her. All were inventions of Sam's imagination, but she was smart enough to know that some pictures probably existed somewhere, and that Jamie's madness was probably a psychotic legacy.  
  
The rape, anyone would believe, and she can see acknowledgement in Jamie's eyes.  
  
Twenty minutes after Malcolm falls, he's sitting on the sofa, grateful for the high back, shirt collar still undone and the pulse points in his neck both visible.  
  
He's glistening with the remnants of a nausea sweat, and his eyes - half-lit, barely open - settle on Sam with a malarial gaze and undisguised, affectionate pride. It's more than he can spare for Jamie, who is sitting next to him looking as remorseful and shell-shocked as any good psychopath or alcoholic should, when his world starts to fall apart.  
  
Somewhere across the past thirty seconds of consciousness, Malcolm has conceded (with the air of a man still holding all the cards), that he is ill. The concession seems to give him satisfaction, or perhaps (Sam shudders, slightly, at the prospect) the drugs are going to make him delirious again. But the smugness passes, fading into cold, and Jamie, looking bereft, sees him shiver.  
  
"....is it AIDS?" he asks.  
  
Malcolm looks visibly appalled. "Jesus, no," he stares, sounding genuinely disconcerted, and shuddering as if it hadn't occurred. "Not unless you know something I fucking don't." he goes on, adding a coda that in violently skeptical and scatological language doubts this could be the case. Jamie shifts, looking at Malcolm with his big, blue, genocide-committing, superlatively unfaithful eyes, and Sam mentally echoes Malcolm's tired wince as if she were the oldest person in the room.  
  
"I wouldn't leave you."  
  
Oh, another wince. He'd never have wanted her to hear those words. In fact, Malcolm doesn't look like he wanted them said at all. He makes another little shudder, as if tired physical effort were all it took to shake this situation from him. It is, after all, what he's been doing for weeks. "Fuck off, Jamie. This isn't the 1980s, for Christ's sake."  
  
"Heart disease? It can't be your fucking cholestrol, you never eat, even though _she_ \- "  
  
" - she has a fucking _name,_ cunt," Malcolm warns him, low and dangerous. The younger man looks exasperated.  
  
"Fine, although _Sam_ 's always bringing you biscuits - biscuits, and that fucking - Jesus Christ, you fucking glutenate chomping _whore_ , is that what Julius Nicholson's about, some sort of sick -- scenery-chewing aside, I'd still quite _welcome_ some fucking explanation as to why you were swapping saliva with that walking testicle - " he stops, not because Malcolm's threatening him with rage or because he's passed out again, but because his proximity to Malcolm has given him sudden insight. Malcolm's brought his knees up to his chest; on them rests his elbows, and during Jamie's latest oratorial foray, rubs his eyes, hard, with the heels of his hand. In the process, his head has dropped forward. His neck is bare, which Jamie has always loved, and on the back of his skull, the steel hair glints like needles in the sunlight. It's coarse, and curls where it hasn't got too short, and in the space where it's disappearing, Malcolm's skull is as pale and fragile as his neck.  
  
Jamie runs his hand over the bones of Malcolm's head, and, just as he's expected, the steel-grey dust falls off in his fingers.  
  
Sam makes herself look away from this.  
  
It brings little relief. After all, she can still _hear_.  
  
Orders be damned, she thinks, and wishes herself across the room, shutting the door behind her. Some things it is not in her job to bear.  
  
But Malcolm made her promise not to leave the room, and so Sam sighs, stretches out her legs, and keeps sitting on the carpet. Malcolm's desk-drawer knobs sitck in her back.  
  
Through sheer self-discipline, she manages to hear nothing for a few long minutes. When Malcolm's voice breaks in, he's releasing her from her duties and it's for the second time of asking. She has to go round the desk to collect her shoes, and (because she can't bear things left undone) to rid the room of Malcolm's sick, which is soaking into the carpet and sending a stench up into the air. Malcolm of course tells her not to, because Jamie will do it: Jamie gives him a look so blindly heartbroken that Sam knows he hasn't heard it, and finishes scraping without a word. This, she tells herself firmly, is nothing to what they'll have to endure.  
  
She goes out via the pantry, dumping the whole bin inside a black bag, expenses and provenance be damned. If anyone for any fucked-up reason finds the contents (she's trying to clean her hands and her face at the same time, a horrible process that makes her feel like Lady Macbeth), she'll claim it's morning sickness and Malcolm's baby she's expecting. That will be less horrible than any version of the truth.  
  
Sam rarely cries and she never gets hysterical, which makes the next three-and-a-half minutes with her forehead against the sideboard rather a surprise. Her schoolday memories of crying are of something done _at speed_ , then instantly abandoned. She was always the one who held the heads and confiscated the diet pills, then lay shuddering in bed for the next six hours. When her parents divorced, boarding school didn't let her wear mascara: accordingly, she thinks she's got herself together long before the moment when she leaves the pantry and butts into poor Julius Nicholson, comfort-eating shortbread and coming the other way.  
  
He calls her _Samantha_ and doesn't blame her for crushing his biscuits. He's got a clean handkerchief and an additional spare, both of which smell blissfully of lavender. He doesn't smell of sick, or illness; in fact, he looks blessedly clean and healthy, and the fact that he is probably as much in love with Malcolm as he is repressed, pathetic and deluded, suddenly don't bother her. She feels as sorry for him as anyone else.  
  
  
Of course, she doesn't tell him exactly what the matter is. She's distraught, not _suicidal_.  
\---  
  
"Is it _bollock_ cancer?"  
  
Malcolm lifts his head very slightly from Jamie's chest, and says otherwise.  
  
He sounds amused, but Jamie can feel him worrying about their proximity to each other and the security of that office door. He hates the sudden tautness, added to emaciation and whatever fucking poison is threatening (his) Malcolm's body and brain. Not even Jamie would go so far as to term Malcolm's body and brain his own posessions, but he's prepared for a vicious fucking dispute over ownership, should whatever fucking disgusting tumour it is acquire a mouthbox (but not Malcolm's, please God not Malcolm's) and speak.  
  
Malcolm's quick hearbeat is against his stomach. It's rare Jamie actually hears it - if they're in bed but not fucking, Jamie's usually asleep, and Malcolm rarely lets him get close at other times. Technically, they're close now, but the price isn't worth it. Thanks to the incident with the bologna, they're keeping their faces averted: ironic, since that's actually their first 'mutual' decision in (Jamie realises) months.  
  
"I thought that was why you picked Nicholson. As a clue."  
  
"'k off."  
  
Every half-formed word frightens Jamie more. Malcolm sounds so weak. Jamie knows that, at some point, the temptation of blinding anger will be irresistible, but all he can feel is a detailed numbness, picked out with gratitude which he's scared to experience fully. Malcolm is still here. Weakness and illness threaten otherwise, but Malcolm, in the face of sudden obstacles, is here with him.  
  
"I started shitting blood," Malcolm says, laconically. "Naturally I intended to sue you."  
  
Jamie jumps like Malcolm's torched him. "You lying bastard, I treated you - you fucking treacherous cunt - "  
  
"Ah, but it's not a cunt, is it? It's in need of some fucking _lubrication_ , it doesn't come prefabricated with its own little sprinklers in a tiny wee case marked "in case of blunt-cocked Caledonian butchers, break glass not your _perineum_.""  
  
Jamie ducks his head so he's mumbling against Malcolm's hair. "I am only being fucking nice because -- "  
  
" -- colon, since you ask. About half the size of Geoff Holnhurst's head." Jamie looks so green at that, that Malcolm rolls his eyes and tries again. "It's the size of a fucking grape, Jamie, probably fucking smaller given the number of IV lines I've had in there.  
  
"You've started chemo."  
  
"Yes." A dry, whiskery little pause, while Jamie is aware of every single hair on Malcolm's head, chest, throat. Jesus, is he really going to lose them all? Both Jamie's parents went from heart attacks, quickly and in close succession. This hinterland is unfamiliar. Malcolm is becoming unfamiliar. At any time, he's bordering on dangerously thin, but now his graveyard features are becoming the knobs of bone and pallour more commonly associated with a freakshow. When he frowns or glares (which is often), his eyes have a new purple hollowing, above and below. All this, Jamie has seen, but not observed. "Actually," Malcolm continues, drawing the syllables out with his teeth as though something is immeasurably droll, "I've been on it three weeks. Trying to shrink it so they don't need to do anything else. Fuckin' awful word, tumour, isn't it? I'm thinking of calling it Little Malcolm. Keep it in a jar on my desk. Next to Steve Fleming's head and what's left of Hugh Abbot."  
  
Jamie homes in the first few seconds of that speech and starts swearing before Malcolm's finished. "Oh, fuck off, Jamie, I don't need you holding my fucking hand."  
  
"Does the PM know?"  
  
Malcolm stares at him as if it is he, and not the 60-hour-week cancer patient, who has gone entirely mad. "Do you think I trust that fucker with the unimportant stuff? For Christ's sake, Jamie, the man's got a brain like the Praed Street Pox Clinic. Fucking addled. He'd shit himself if his PA didn't make him take loo breaks, and he's so inbred his family tree's actually just a picture of a sheep. I don't tell that genetically-retarded Jack-Wills-wearing freak what day it is - which is probably a bad idea, he doesn't fucking know - I'm not gonna tell him anything iimportant. And neither are you."  
  
He starts off towards the door, buttoning his shirt. It's probably a ploy - Malcolm makes fucking effective use of just turning his back on Jamie, probably because Jamie once did it to him and it's not something either of them can stand - but Jamie can't help it being a successful one.  
  
"So you're just going to have a fucking operation, and a bout of chaemo - "  
  
" - and radiotherapy," Malcolm counters, turning back to face him, eyes small and suddenly very nasty. "To make sure it doesn't come back."  
  
" - you're just going to fuck yourself seven ways until Sunday and expect nobody to fucking notice?"  
  
"You didn't."  
  
That is almost the unsayable, but Malcolm's not moving and Jamie's not prepared to concede any hurt feelings and let Malcolm win the argument. "All right, shit-for-brains, tell me the fucking plan." There is no point reasoning with Malcolm. There is no point begging him to rest, or go home, or to take a sane person's view of his health. Jamie knows he'll probably do all of these before they're through, but for the moment he's prepared to ball his fists into nuclear missiles and let the mad fuck have his say.  
  
"The PM is going to send me on a fucking fact-finder to Lebanon for the week of the operation. Half-week," he corrects himself, looking defiant and, unfortunately, slightly discoloured. Jamie uses one strike and tells him to sit down. Malcolm refuses, but this does not distract Jamie from the stupidity of Malcolm's scheme.  
  
"Lebanon? Why the fuck -- "  
  
"No fucking cameras. It won't get out for a few days, by then I'll be back, if I keep needing to shit we can call it fucking food poisoning, and since it's the fucking Arabs everyone'll assume we're about to go to war and _I'll_ be very fucking important again."  
  
"You're having your operation in Lebanon?"  
  
"Jesus, have you always been this fucking dim or is death bestowing a bit of clarity? Of course not, I'm having it done in a very fucking nice discreet little clinic, at great personal expense and no cost to the taxpayer."  
  
"And exactly why is our Glorious Leader meant to send you off - Malcolm, this is a fucking terrible plan."  
  
Willing himself to stay upright (what he really needed after vomiting was a _sleep_ ; Sam was pretty good about clearing his schedule for half an hour that'd let him limp through the day), Malcolm focussed hard enough to consider. It was true that the plan, cooked up in his cooking brain during one of the too-frequent night sweats, didn't sound as terrifyingly impressive as previously supposed. "Yeah, well, you think of something better."  
  
"Someone'll notice you're not in fucking Lebanon. Including, let me just think about it, the fucking Lebanese."  
  
"I know." Malcolm's eyes gleamed with the conviction of the dehydrated and insane. "That's why you're going. They won't understand either of our accents, you're never on television and since I've been out of the press they won't fucking realise I'm eight fucking stone and bald. True, you don't have a tangerine's worth of free radicals knotting up your colonic tissue, but -- "  
  
  
" -- tangerine? Fucking _tangerine_ , you said it was a fucking _grape_ a few seconds ago."  
  
"Who the fuck are you, Carmen Miranda? Just stoop to the side and wince a bit, they'll never know you're not me. If I die, they might even give you a BAFTA."  
  
There is a silence. The quality of that silence is as of a cavernous intergalactic cake-hole, sucking furniture, carpets and bloodflow into its orbit. Jamie attempts to withstand it but cannot.  
  
"You want me to go to _fucking Lebanon_ the week you have your fucking intestine patched up with whatever spare shitty connective tissue, fucking _sausage casings_ your Harley Street knockoff has lying on the floor?"  
  
"Yeah well, if you don't like it, you think of something fucking better."  
  
"And why the fuck should I?"  
  
Malcolm turns. He's done his shirt up, and while spitting out the last piece of invective, he tucks it back in. "If you don't, I won't have the operation. If there's any way for those cretins out there to find out I'm in here with a fucking fruit salad of mutant cells in me, I'll fucking pass."  
  
"Pass _away_ , you mean. Drop dead in fucking six months."  
  
"A week is a very fucking long time in politics, _cunt_ ," Malcolm hisses, and the expletive is so much worse coming from a man with fear in his eyes. "I have no intention of dropping dead, but if you don't share my miraculous fucking confidence in the powers of Our Lord - which, by the way, is a shite attitude for a priest, you fucking _nonce_ \- I suggest you find a way to make this work. Now fuck off, I've got a meeting with the big boys. Go and buy yourself something pretty. Like a noose."  
  
Jamie's reply cannot be printed, and it makes him wish he was dead. Malcolm turns with his hand on the doorknob, and he's doing a very good impression of a nightmare on legs.  
  
"If you tell anyone about this, you fucking Gorbals sad act, I'll make your access arrangements a thing of the fucking past so fucking quickly you'll look like a post-op Linda Blair." Jamie isn't focussing on him with quite the terror Malcolm deserves. He raises his voice. "I said, I'll make your head fucking spin!"  
  
"I heard you. How the fuck do you plan to get through lunch?"  
  
Malcolm's face twists. "I'm on fucking _South Beach_. Now go and sit in the road."  
  
Jamie hears him yelling for Sam as he goes through the door.  
  
\----  
  
1 Malcolm claims to have a healthy respect for lesbians. While this is debatable, his respect is definitely healthier than Jamie's.  
  
2 Malcolm fucking loves a rentboy scandal. He's often thought his life with Jamie would be simpler, could he pay him.   
  
3 Jamie once ended a civil servant's career after the man asked Sam if she ever dressed up in her uniform.   
  
4 Except for Glenn Cullen. You heard me.   
  
5 PURELY.   
  
6 Frankly, it's known worse.


	2. The nature of my game.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A day and a night in the (possibly limited) life of Malcolm Tucker. Sam has a boyfriend; Malcolm has a bad taste in his mouth.

INT. PRESS CONFERENCE (DAY).  
Malcolm's lunch meeting rolls into a press conference, during which he shows remarkable presence of mind: lines fed and adhered to, vulture grin toned down for camera, and much scrawling of vicious cartoon faces on tabletops, to remind the PM _never_ to do that smile.   
  
Julius Nicholson is surprisingly chipper, which is bizarre but not unduly worrying - either he thinks what happened with Malcolm was genuine foreplay, 1 or he's recognised his lonely wanklust was misdirected:He smiles at Malcolm, but only in the general, shit-eating sense.  
  
Back at the coalface, there've been some terror alerts slightly less mind-numbing than usual, so Malcolm manages to divert his thoughts from actioning the Treasury's Inbox via a three-metre _spear_ , to concentrate on the infinitesimal possibility that another quorum of Luton sad acts might successfully channel their acne-pitted sexual frustration into major fucking disruption for the London Transport Authority. At least the Motherwell kids have the decency to stick to heroin (he and Jamie always preferred a nice line of coke).2  
  
Malcolm likes to have Sam around for these things, not least because she knows how to break things up fast. For most of the afternoon, he thinks a speedy exit won't be necessary (he is, after all, drinking a lot of fucking Red Bull), but apparently cancer is _exactly_ like your abandoned prozzer girlfriend who turns up sixteen years later demanding enormous fucking backpayments from the CSA, except in Malcolm's case the brow-beetled unisex lovechild is all the thousands of hours of f sleep he's missed out on in the past political century. His eyes look like he's done three rounds with a glue-sniffing panda, his face is reenacting the socio-cultural experience depicted in the lyrics of Pulp's seminal 'Mile End', and he really badly wants another Immodium. Which he can't have just in case the tumour backs up and kills him. This, by anyone's standards, is a seriously bad day.  
  
Not as bad as the next one will be, though; events will make sure of that. But Malcolm doesn't know that, and thus is content with ending the conference before invisible knives start stabbing him in the face. He manages to deflect whatever witless fuckery Nicola comes up with on the way out, and lasts another four hours with a simmering Blackberry on his ear, before going home. Tomorrow is another "Briefing - Th.V" on the diary and calendar, and he wants to make the most of his freedom.3  
  
Sam seems to be coping well, considering her new role as subterfuge provider of semi-palliative care. Truth be told, Malcolm adores her, even if he does fucking _abhor_ her on-off boyfriend, her mother, and the wankers who ooze over from the the Inns of Court and think themselves acceptable playmates. Obviously, anybody's better than Fucking Freddie, the wankslut jizzcloth who somehow cornered Sam at Freshers' Fair and convinced her she wanted to spend the next two decades staring at the place where his chin ought to be. Freddie has a face like a squashed baby and hair like a dead cat, and even if Sam is bright enough not to live with him (she has said, in passing, that Freddie is kind and gentle and occasionally _good fun_ , which Malcolm interprets as her imminent intention of becoming Mrs Fat Fruitcake, and immediately raises her salary),4 Malcolm doesn't trust him not to surreptitiously land her with a squad of his chinless brats.   
  
In fact, Malcolm doesn't trust anybody when it comes to the myriad virtues of his Personal Assistant. He's even caught Julius giving her the fish-eye once, which made his palms ache. If Steve Fleming ever tries it, he'll kill him, and if Olly Reeder ever tries, he'll just point and fucking laugh while _Jamie_ fires up the stun gun. Sam's actually a black belt in karate and has studied self-defence, but Malcolm likes to think that, if push came to prick, she'd let him play his part with the tongs and the fire pokers.   
  
Sam gives him a distinctly old-fashioned look as he leaves. He pats her hand and shoves fifty quid into it, in lieu of taking adult responsibility for his tumour or his treatment. He gets a stupid little kick, even now, of avoiding her eye rolls and polite refusals, and wonders with pleasure what goading little charity receipt card she'll place on his desk tomorrow. Usually it's gay rights for turtles, or saving old churches, or any other brown-lentils cause of which Malcolm technically approves but which invariably enrage him when presented in shiny laminate. They only generate more fucking awful Charity Christmas Cards, or invitations to the 'Press Nights' of whichever bumfluff MP's kid has turned his jerking circle from drama school into a growing concern for Physical Theatre in Brazil.   
  
Approaching his own front step, Malcolm realises Jamie is almost certainly in the house. Jamie starts breaking and entering whenever he wants to make a fucking point, which is one of the reasons Malcolm keeps him updated with a key. At least after this afternoon (Malcolm really needs to skirt round the memory), Jamie won't attempt to cook.   
  
Jamie is sitting on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, watching a re-run of an old Rangers game that looks like it's been beamed in from outer space. Technological equipment does this to Jamie: every photo he takes is blurred; every film footage he acquires looks like it was done in the 1970s on the bastard lovechild of a glue gun and Super 8. Malcolm's never known him manage a photocopy without it looking like a third-generation knockoff.   
  
When Jamie sees Malcolm, he jumps up, knocking over a glass of really quite decent red, which means the first minutes of Malcolm's homecoming are spent blotting kitchen roll and spraying Vanish-and-Febreeze, with the half-cut fuck trying to hold his hand. "This isn't fucking _Love Story_ ," Malcolm bites, but of course Jamie's never actually seen a film that didn't have Deep Throat Sluts in the title (he's watched the entire series, right up to the corporate-themed Part XIV, How To Suck Seed In Business), mishears, and gets defensive as only a half-cut, emotionally wrecked psychopath can.  
  
 Malcolm ends up just staring at him, all dead-eyed and quiet, waiting until the inevitable moment when Jamie discovers that the papers he used for blotting were the WrongDiagnosis printouts he's been trawling all afternoon, now purple-stained, damp and illegible.  
  
This is when Jamie admits he doesn't know what to fucking _do_ , and Malcolm exhales, and the blue of Jamie's eyes makes him look twelve years old. For the first time since the cunting doctor's office ("Now, Mr. Tucker, the results have come back and I have to tell you [...]"), Malcolm feels genuinely depressed. For want of other idleness, they sit down and watch the Ibrox game, occasionally pausing to text Washington or order strippers to Olly Reeder's house.   
  
And then Jamie mentions, actually, he went in to see Wall-Eyed Julie in the lesser circle of Hell called HR, and Malcolm's got two full months of holiday due,5 and any number of crack-addled relatives back in Glasgow that Jamie's willing to annihilate if it'll induce Malcolm to take personal leave, and then rambles on for about ten minutes on the sixteen different ways they might, just, possibly be able to get through this.  
  
Of course, Malcolm refuses all of them. He's going in to work tomorrow, and a little thing like a fruit-shaped tumour in his abdomen won't stop him. But he eats some of the cereal Jamie's bought him, even though all he tastes is sheet metal, and even if he's fucking revolted by Jamie's socks, and Jamie's detritus, and the additional buzzing of Blackberries and the possibility of Jamie's calls being traced to his phone, he's grateful that there's at least one psycho out there willing to help him make a plan.   
  
He drifts off with Jamie clamped to his back, which doesn't help with the overheating, but does prompt a midnight reverie in which he wonders the precise limits of what Jamie's prepared to do for him. Twice more, he wakes to the soft glow and muffled thumpings which mean Jamie's on the laptop again; and, once more, to silence, and the outline of Jamie standing motionless at the window.   
  
Just before passing out again, Malcolm has one of those red slam moments of panic, the ones which are occurring with greater quantitative frequency and are thus difficult to ignore. He has no tools to withstand this. He just has to lie there, until some trick of Jamie's heavy arm and warm breath, returning to the bed, tricks him into forgetting, unknotting slightly against so much heat and weight and life. Jamie burrows his face into the back of Malcolm's hair. Malcolm falls asleep, slightly comforted, one hand pressed back against Jamie's chest.  
  
  
1 This is not inconceivable. Julius was at Eton, where roughousing and assault frequently _did_ act as preludes to buggery. Except at Eton, Jamie would have hauled them _both_ out of the room, then transferred the whole assignation to somewhere distinctly more sado-masochistic. ...on balance, Julius finds it quite difficult to imagine Jamie at Eton.  
  
2 After that fucking fiasco on his forty-seventh birthday, he's completely sworn off anything in tablet form, or anything which Jamie's got From A Mate. Malcolm's met Jamie's mates. They smell of violence and their eyes swivel even more madly than his do.  
  
3 Some of Malcolm's favourite people are the fucked-up, depraved and secretive bods in the Secret Service, and he's sure they won't mind him taking their name in vain for a little bit of calendar camouflage. After all, fuck it, they probably already know. It occurs to Malcolm that if he ever gets round to writing his own <I>Diaries of Alan Clark</i>, he'll have to do a hell of a lot of decoding.  
  
4 The day Sam announces her engagement, Malcolm's decided, is the day he'll plant a bomb under Freddie's fridge and lock her up at work. Actually, Sam and Freddie split for good three months ago, but she quite enjoys the rage-infused pay rises.  
  
5 Malcolm fucking hates holidays because he fucking hates leaving London. Aeroplanes make his ears pop, and he's pathologically allergic to sun.


	3. Have some sympathy, and some taste.

When Malcolm gets out of bed the next morning, he falls on the floor and cannot get up for five minutes. The terrible standoff, with Jamie's arm looped under Malcolm's knees ("Get some fucking practice in, I won't be dying in a hospice"), lasts a while. Malcolm goes greyer and greyer and continues to manifest every intention of spending the day at work, blaming the fall on Jamie before (unexpectedly) offering the latter a flat choice between helping him shower or a manslaughter conviction. And then Malcolm cracks his head on the one of the nine thousand chrome nozzles that make the shower resemble a luxurious decontamination unit.   
  
Malcolm's grateful that this tumour is at least fucking painful, because the possibility his head will burst with agony is better than the alternative of fully focussing on the fact that Caledonia's badly-stitched-boy, the incitement to human Whack-A-Rat, is using a soapy flannel to clean his hair and skin. Jamie broods in thickening silence and is infinitely fucking gentle, partly because of his brother (one of his brothers, one who's not around anymore), and partly because guilt at having thought Malcolm was _unfaithful_ when actually something mutant's fucking his innards, is more than his limited moral compass can stand.   
  
He knows that Malcolm is leaning against him not through choice but because of pain, and that outside the cubicle is a world-load of aggravating, incompetent cunts waiting to fuck them. He can feel Malcolm conserving all his strength, from that moment on, to the end of the car journey, where, shimmering like radioactive waste, Malcolm mentions a outcall to fucking _Wandsworth_ in the name of a bunch of stupid white criminals not bottling a bunch of stupid brown fascists. Then, sloughing off all the humiliation, the resentment, and - for a second - even the sickness, Malcolm reverts to icy, untouchable type and glides behind a locked door.   
  
Frankie is already waiting at the door of the Press Office, watching Jamie with a face that (unmistakably) says, "I am fucking blind and deaf to your suffering, and something cataclysmic happened on the night shift".   
  
Jamie's prepared to bet it's nothing a little terror wouldn't solve, but Malcolm has Cabinet and Jamie decides to solve it himself, by the simple expedient of finding Cock Robin at the Treasury and introducing him to the most relevant snaps in Jamie's Picture File.   
  
Meanwhile, Malcolm vomits into another bin, refuses water, and gets through Cabinet despite the prevalence of stars in front of his eyes.  
  
It gives him a certain vicious satisfaction that he's still the only interesting person in the room. Nicola and Clare Ballantyne both ask if he's feeling okay, and he manages to construct a joint reply labelling them lesbians and/or predatory man-hungry fuckwitches. Inwardly, he flatters himself that noone could really suspect a thing. After all, he _always_ looks like he's got cancer.  
  
Then he takes a sleek Ministerail deathcab to the knock-off Harley Street, and climbs the stairs (not even a fucking lift, what an indignity) to the all-purpose pox, tits and tumour clinic where nobody speaks enough English to effectively contact the press.   
  
Just after the third floor, death seems like an insignificance and not worth avoiding. He's covered in white-hot sweat, and lying down on the bed is a relief. Even the insertion of the needle doesn't matter much.   
  
The process lasts an hour. When he gets out, Nicola Murray is sitting in the foyer, looking guilty.  
  
It takes Malcolm some time to believe that Nicola Murray could have the _nous_ to follow him. Then a small Asian girl who only looks old enough to be a gynaecologist's _tiny child_ comes out and asks Nicola in ungrammatical English whether she's ready to see Mr Kobowski. Now, Malcolm, in his other life before intravenous chemotherapy and the first sight of his skull, knew Mr Kobowski pretty fucking well as the eminent physician to whom nice kind Tom Rudd so kindly sent his secretary nine weeks after that trip to Brussels. Malcolm's character assassination of Nicola thus immediately acquires a new and interesting direction: when the small Asian girl asks if Nicola's husband will accompany her, Malcolm says too fucking right he will, and Nicola tries to drop through the floor.  
  
It's a consultation, interrupted by Malcolm asking 'Who's is it, who's is it, who's is it' four hundred times and Nicola trying to explain that she had to think of _something_ when the receptionist asked if she could help, and since she doesn't want either a facelift - Malcolm, that's out of order - OR, MALCOLM, CHEMOTHERAPY - at which point Malcolm ends the consultation, snarls at Kobowski that this interview _never fucking happened_ , and drags Nicola back towards the stairs (muttering, all the while, "I have a fucking ClearBlue in my briefcase and if you don't convince me I'll make you fucking use it").   
  
Which is when he starts to see stars and has to sit down.   
  
What Malcolm finds _really_ depressing is that how little time passes before Nicola all-too-obviously forgets he's the demon bastard of Downing Street and remembers she's a proper grown-up who's mothered four children. Malcolm finds himself drinking water out of a paper cup that Nicola's _holding under his chin_ , and even when he does the necessary and knocks it all over her top, she only rolls her eyes in a tired way that Malcolm suspects really pisses off Olly, Glenn, and collective Casa Murray. It certainly makes him, Malcolm, want to pull vicious faces last seen in Class 3R of the Pontypavill Street Holy Family First School. He has to put so much energy into vicious glowering that the vein between his eyes start to throb.  
  
"Malcolm," Nicola says gently, and the dangerous bitch is looking enough like a stretch-marked, lemon-lipped, low-bosomed human being that her former torturer feels a great deal of alarm.  
  
"Stairs," he rasps, nodding down the staircase on which they are currently sitting. He spent a lot of time in the stairwells like this before job interviews, eight hundred years ago when Socialism was young and Jamie hadn't made his appearance. He'd been in no hurry to revisit them, especially not with Nicola, who has always hovered in the dangerous space between total lunacy and knowing too much. "I bet you fucking love this, don't you, stairs are just your thing."  
  
"Malcolm," she says gently, "I'm so sorry."  
  
This is equally bad as the moment she saw him sacked, and distinctly worse than the first time she'd met Jamie. That had been the tail-end of the row in which he and Everyone's Favourite Attack Dog had anatomised the night of Tom's coronation, and if Nicola was too stupid to _fully_ translate the coded threats and recriminations both men were throwing at each other, Jamie's importance in the grander scheme of things, she'd almost certainly guessed.   
  
Malcolm had a lot of strict rules about Jamie (with the exception of Old Firm games and collective Tuesday night curries, they'd never had so much as a pint in public - and never would), and Nicola thus broke most of them.  
  
She has enough sense not to ask why Malcolm doesn't just go home. As a kind of reward, Malcolm decides (it might be his last magnanimous act, and possibly he'll extend some political influence from beyond the grave, Nicola's always looked the hysterical type) to tell her.  
  
"If I don't keep _this_ , there'll be nothing to come back for." By this, he means the job that helped him grow the tumour. It's one of the existential ironies of life.  
  
She doesn't argue. She really fucking ought to, at least _reflexively_ , because (as Malcolm understands it) the only point of ruining your finances and your fucking furniture dropping brats is to load your ravaged body up with some fucking mental cottonfluff about the joyfulness of life (that was, Malcolm thought, about the only advantage spawning Jamie's brats had given his wife). This makes Malcolm suspect Nicola is a colder and more driven person than he's previously thought.   
  
Then again, her next question might well mean she's just stupid. "Do you have someone at home?"  
  
Oh, fuck it. She's weak and willing and there's noone to sell him out to, anyway. "Jamie." A beat. "In the summer, I tie him to a post and use him as a crowscarer."  
  
Nicola offers a sympathetic smile, but for the first time in living (ick) memory, Malcolm's avoiding eye contact. The idea of him at home with Jamie is suddenly unbearably sad. "And is _he_ all right? I mean - you need _support_."  
  
Instant offense; his guards are reflexively up. Bile. "Enough of the questions, Oprah fucking Winfrey, get to fuck. I said, I've _got Jamie_."  
  
"And I've got a pond full of koi carp, but I wouldn't rely on them in a crisis."  
  
That is nearly like imputing that Jamie is _less than reliable_ in a fucking crisis, which would be an entirely unwarranted reference to events that lead to Jamie's transfer to the FCO, on which Nicola has no fucking right to comment. "I've got Jamie. Whether he's my personal bumboy or the fucking face I keep at the windows, is none o'your fucking concern." He sits up on his elbows. His breath is coming in a rasping wheeze. Nicola knows enough to tell that, on chemotherapy, it's a sign of vitamin deficiency, but given Malcolm's expression of fury at his own enfeebledness, she decides not to mention it. "I've got everything."  
  
"D'you want me to call him? Or your sister, I - "  
  
"Oh, like you've got my sister's fucking number. Nobody's got that.1 Piss off back to DoSAC, you stupid woman. Christ." He presses his palm against the section of snowy dress shirt that presumably covers his side. Nicola looks nauseous.  
  
"How, er, big is it? The, lump."  
  
Malcolm sighs, breathing through the pain. "I presumed you didn't mean my cock. It's like an orange. A runty one. Ungrateful bastard, Vitamin C's the only one I can remember. Fuck."  
  
An orderly passes them, breaking into a scurry as she clocks Malcolm's face. Watching the flash of recognition, Nicola grows even uneasier. "...Malcolm, we can't keep this quiet."  
  
He sighs. "I'll take out an injunction."  
  
"It's still going to break, you _know_ that. You'll be - bald, for Christ's sake, and you're ill, it's not good for the _country_ ," she adds wildly, trying to find _something_ to strike a chord with him.   
  
"What's not good for this country is the fucking Secretary of State visiting an abortionist in the middle of the afternoon. Listen, darling, your bent husband and your slapper daughter - your slapper daughter, Nicola - make my guts look like a national fucking holiday. Compared to you, as PR for Britain PLC, I'm Children in Fucking Need. I'm rosy-cheeked, big-cocked firemen pulling tiny kids out of the rubble. I'm the suffragettes. I'm _grammar schools_ and free fucking milk and Page 3, all of which your shitty department is meant to take an interest in, so get back to your padded cell and fucking _govern_. Help me up."  
  
Reeling more from his last sentence than any of the preceding abuse (Malcolm sometimes suspects that Nicola has the ability to just _switch off_ when he swears at her, which disconcerts him), Nicola jumps up and obeys, but then his Blackberry rings. Malcolm answers, listens for five seconds, mutters something in an undertone, hangs up and looms towards Nicola in a way that nearly sees them both go flying down the stairs.   
  
"It's broken. You stupid bitch. You stupid -- _fuck_ , Fleming'll be in Downing Street - _fuck_ ITN, if they run with this - I will not be one of those baldy-teddy dolphin-shaggers, you can tell them that. Jesus."   
  
He makes Nicola get them downstairs, and then - embarassingly - dart out into the street and select a passerby of Malcolm's choice to get them a cab. Malcolm chooses the first teenager they see, someone spotty and stupid enough not to recognise him. Nicola knows there's v. little possibility anyone will recognise her. Malcolm more or less collapses against the long back seat, leaving Nicola to face backwards (which she doesn't like - much like being in lifts, the backwards motion induces the sensations she will both die and vomit).   
  
Despite years in politics and indeed on Earth, she's never heard anyone shout "Just drive!" before, and sits frozen in awkwardness as the taxi circles Westminster and Malcolm croaks into his phone. Various ITN minions are contacted and sworn at - Nicola is briefly forced to impersonate his lawyer, a performance made more stressful and less convincing by Malcolm hissing "do the fucking accent, you Roedean slut" throughout, teeth bared like a slathering dog. Throughout, Malcolm asserts perfect health better than any emaciated ghoul with IV marks should. A battery of calls starts flying the _other_ way, though, with the hairy, terrifying contents of Malcolm's press room ringing to ask the boss whether he's got cancer or Nicola's got a bun in the oven. At one point, Malcolm (now covered in a toxic sheen of sweat) covers the phone to ask if Nicola would consider _having_ an abortion, just as a decoy: Nicola screams that she's not fucking pregnant so loudly 2 that the driver gets distracted and nearly takes out a cyclist. Normally Malcolm would applaud, but he hits his head on the window and gets even angrier: after the row, at least, the idea's not mentioned again. Malcolm tells the minions clearly he may have cancer but if ITN say as much, they'll be fucking swimming to Washington: Nicola only knows Jamie's on the line when Malcolm goes quiet for more than half a second.  
  
"A fucking tangerine? You said a _grape_ , you bastard, you said a grape."   
  
Nicola cannot hear the crack in Jamie's voice, but she can see the change in Malcolm's face.  
  
Their conversation is mercifully short, and Nicola tries to look at the floor for all of it. Ideally, she'd just drop through it and die, but instead she gets out at Richmond Terrace and leaves Malcolm to head back to Islington. Her last image is of his temple against the window, eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose like he's trying to keep the two halves of his face together.  
  
He hasn't told Jamie - or the press - the truth about his op. The truth is that the tumour's too big to risk it.  
  
\----  
  
INT. MALCOLM'S OFFICE (DAY)  
  
Jamie devotes the rest of the afternoon to ensuring ITN will not dare to publish even a syllable on the subject of Malcolm's illness. In a way he'd never mention, some sick and dormant instinct to protect the gaunt madman whose bed he occupies on sufferance is finally being assuaged.   
  
Not since the day Malcolm gave him a PR job in an interview process that most resembled a police line-up has Jamie wanted to be _anything_ but Malcolm Tucker's Word-Made-Flesh (except for the FCO aberration that just reconfirmed how boring another life would be). Now he's operating on an odd mix of anger and fear, laced together with a guilt that is more potent than adrenaline.   
  
Malcolm rings him again at about four, unusually through the office landline - hearing the fucking tangerine-bumfuck's voice fills Jamie simultaneously with rage and an almost disabling desire to go home and hug him. Jamie has never had the impulse to hug Malcolm in his life, so he settles for bitching at him for fifteen minutes, then leaving an abusive voicemail for Nicola, c/o Glenn Cullen.   
  
Everyone, of course, knows Malcolm has cancer. It's got round Whitehall like shit in a U-bend, and Jamie doesn't even try to stop it. He just settles for a few media-lynchings _pour encourager les autres_. Every spare prick in Press has been sent to track Fleming to his lair and clip a little electronic ring round his sagging scrotum: if anything's going to make Malcolm a) metastasize or b) come rushing back into work, it's the idea Steve Fleming might be within a mile of his desk. Jame might just post Fleming a nailbomb.  
  
Sam does sterling work. Jamie fucking loves her. He'd fucking _marry_ her if she were Scottish and Malcolm wouldn't put his balls on twin spikes. Julius Nicholson doesn't seem to be in, which is a pity, because Jamie has promised himself Nicholson's baldy head (except baldy heads make Jamie suddenly want to boak) on a spike, for real this time, if he can just get to seven without any kind of sputtering emotional crisis. He keeps having flashbacks to last night's nightmare, the one about organising Malcolm's memorial service on a sinking houseboat, with his Aunty Glenis glowering in one corner, and Malcolm's wife, Mary, on the right. He's sweating.  
  
Then, at four-thirty, Inspiron PicturesTM text Frankie a picture of Malcolm and Nicola leaving the clinic, timestamped 10:30 a.m. that day. Another call brings confirmation it was _chemo_ : the Korean receptionist wasn't as sweetly stupid as she appeared,3 so Jamie's suddenly facing the revelation that Malcolm had chemo today, without telling him, and that he (and perhaps also Jamie himself) is being long-lensed. If he goes to Malcolm's house tonight, the press will almost certainly find him.  
  
Fuck that, Jamie thinks suddenly. There's nowhere _else_ I'll be.  
  
He takes his Blackberry (a new Blackberry, delivered on expenses after Sam destroyed the old one) and sends a message.      _kobowskis for chemo? you and glummy v fucking COSEY cunt  
  
_ The reply is instantaneous.       _yeh, we're having a cancer baby. blue for a boy, pink for dignitas. learn to spell. malcXXXXX ps stfu I'm trying to sleep.  
  
_ For once, Jamie genuinely doesn't find him funny.     _right why dont i believe you're at home  
  
_ Malcolm's reply is a picture message that takes a few seconds to load. Jamie frowns, then stares, lightheaded, as he recognises his own sofa, Malcolm's feet, the _Kes_ DVD (technically Malcolm's, but his only possession that lives permanently at Jamie's flat) and a half-bottle of Jamie's finest Scotch. That Malcolm should have chosen _his_ flat as a refuge, situated on the wrong side of White City (Malcolm maintains that White City is just one big STI, and never visits unless it's to end someone's career), does strange and fearful things to the aortic tissue massed behind Jamie's tar-stained ribs.   
  
In a rush of lunatic adrenaline, he sends an email he's glad Malc will have the sense to delete. Then he puts down the Blackberry, and continues fisting ITN to death.  
  
\----  
INT. MALCOLM'S OFFICE (NIGHT)  
  
10.01 and Jamie's so fucking confident of having cowed ITN into whimpering, skidmarked submission that he's packing his briefcase while the Forces of Darkness cheer Comms triumph in the office. He's been working in Malcolm's office since six, partly as a human shield for Malcolm's desk, and partly because Malcolm's debris, the lingering smell of him, goes a long way towards silencing the white noise at the back of his head.   
  
The waves of crowing from the press room are a distant reminder that he's triumphed for today, and he basks long enough not to realise Sam's there until she's standing right beside him, pale and sombre. Sam is, as it happens, having a fucking atrocious day because she let _Julius Nicholson_ have dinner with her the night before, and mistakenly allowed him to _kiss_ her. These horrors, however, pale into insignificance next to the three letters she must speak to Jamie.  
  
"BBC."  
  
Jamie bolts into the Press Room and starts thumping indiscriminately until someone gives him a remote. Tristrams Incorporated are obviously halfway through the piece, but Malcolm's headshot is to the left of the newsreader, and there's a roar of discontent that's sucked away abruptly when the photo disappears and Malcolm himself appears on the screen, backed by potted ferns.  
  
He's pre-recorded in a blue jumper, talking cheerfully in a low-backed chair. Jamie recognises one of the White City studios, and suddenly cannot hear what Malcolm's saying.  
  
When Sam finds a laptop and backs up the as-live streaming, Jamie discovers he's announcing months of treatment in what the broadsheets will call 'a touching and candid interview', in addition to an operation to remove an "apple-shaped" tumour from his large intestine. On the seventh rewatching, Jamie starts to appreciate the audacity of Malcolm's political rebranding: the man manages to come across as both saint and sufferer. A nice man. Until the seventh watching, however, Jamie can only concentrate on how Malcolm begged him not to let ITN break the story, before enabling the BBC to do exactly that.   
  
He can have only one motive. It's one that Jamie is prepared to beat out of him.  
  
He leaves without a word to anyone, including Sam, who quietly spends a further two hours tying up loose ends while ignoring both the desire to weep (it's shocking and clarifying to see Malcolm on screen) and the missed J Nicholson calls on her mobile. Last night, she's forced to conclude, was a moment of unrepeatable weakness, brought on by exhaustion and the desire to be nice to at least one of Malcolm's deranged, half-lunatic victims.4 She didn't realise Julius still had a shred of the heterosexual in him. On balance, she can only assume some man left it there.  
  
  
1 Apart from Sam and MI5. Malcolm's always preferred that Jamie and Sue shouldn't have too much direct contact.  
  
2 And, for clarity, that you can't abort something that isn't fucking there. Malcolm gives the ghost of a dead ex-smile and says that's not what his ex-wife tells him.  
  
3 So fuck you, honestly.  
  
4 This is a lesson she should have learned at public school: don't collude with deluded homosexuals.


	4. I'll lay your soul to waste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie comes bearing not an olive branch but a variety of fruit missiles; Malcolm tells the truth; Sam doesn't, but doesn't have to; Julius justifies his existence; wheels start turning, and everything goes wrong. But not as badly as it will next chapter.

Jamie, very naturally, starts shouting at Malcolm the moment he's through the door. He also throws missiles, twelve of them, which he made a bemused Downing Street driver leap out and buy at the Collivale traffic lights. Apple after apple goes hurtling past Malcolm's head (although two hit his shins, at which Jamie is glad), while Jamie roars blue murder at Malcolm for letting him find out in an interview, for making a fucking fool of him, for t _elling him it was a satsuma_ or what the fuck ever, when in fact it's fucking not. "Come on then, be specific. Cox's? Pink Lady? Bramley fucking cooking apple? I've bought them all, just _point_ \-- are you fucking listening to me?"   
  
Malcolm is not. He's getting a verbal bollocking from someone on the other end of his Blackberry, someone with a high and distinctly feminine timbre of tinny speech. The only three women Malcolm would (currently) listen to for this long are his sister, Sam, and (fucking) Nicola (fucking) Murray, who has always been M&S moist for the unhinged bastard, thus adding herself to the long list of devious bitches (of all sexes) who would like to take Malcolm away from him. Jamie seethes: at present, Malcolm looks bored as well as bitter and irritated, which strongly suggests it's Oprah herself. Jamie strides across and tries to wrench the phone from his liar's grasp.  
  
"You said it was fucking _Wandsworth_ \- I know what you're trying, you stupid cunt. You couldn't get rid of me when you were on full throttle, do you think you'll manage it now you're - oh, who the fuck -  
  
"I'm sorry, this is Mo Mowlam's listening service," Jamie blares, sing-songing the words like a secretary on acid, or possibly a deranged parrot. "Mo can't come to the phone right now, because she's too busy having her bollocks removed via fish-hook. If you'd like to leave a message I'll have it engraved in bronze and then ram it down your fucking throat, Nicola, and when you eventually shit it out through your ravaged, Palahniuk body, I'll chain you to that same ceremonial plaque and chuck you into the black hairy bowels of the City of London's Thames, where it'll sink about as deep as your fucking career. You stupid, stupid, stupid --"  
  
Jamie's voice is beginning to stick in a recursive loop that's threatening to create a vortex, and Malcolm (deprived of his phone, and more worried by the high note in Jamie's voice than he'd care to admit), tries to get round him, reclaiming his phone and something of his sanity. Jamie doesn't see him coming, and swears to himself it's unintentional, but when a hand grips his arm with unexpected strength, Jamie's mid-rant and lashes out. Jamie's still got furniture in boxes although he moved in three years ago, and it's a cardboard box that breaks their heavy, inevitable fall.   
  
Although he doesn't pass out, it's a close-run thing, and when Malcolm next has a definite grip on reality, Jamie is clutching him, and sobbing in the best psycho-alcoholic tradition. Without tears. It's roughly equivalent to what Malcolm's father used to do, although in Jamie's case 'alcoholic' is actually an unfair description, since it's Malcolm who's been necking booze since his dry-mouthed, jittery return from the BBC, that morning _._ Still, memories of gin-soaked penitence are enough to make Malcolm stay still and unresponsive, too tired to need any mental distraction, able to just shut down.  
  
Jamie shakes him once or twice, then lies down beside him on the remaining detritus of his packaged, married life. They face each other, Malcolm hating the proximity because Jamie's eyes are suddenly the mirror imprint of his own fear. They're lying on a squashed box of largely-broken picture frames and throw cushions that Claire Wilson Macdonald chose and which Jamie retains out of spite. There are pictures of Ruth, Maggie and Holly on the walls. If Malcolm reached out, he could touch Jamie's skirting-board. Jamie is still fucking there. Malcolm realises then the plan has failed, that there's just no way Jamie will leave.   
  
Nevertheless, something about the situation gives Malcolm one last idea.  
  
"I lied about the operation."  
  
Jamie doesn't look at him.  Malcolm knows it's a fucking elementary tactic to make someone keep talking, but he's willing to go out in one last kamikaze strike. "It's too big and they can't risk it. If something went wrong I'd be eating through a tube, or squirting like one of those squeezy lemons."  
  
Pause. "Except with blood?" Malcolm can hear Jamie's heart; it's pounding. He exhales. Thank fuck: he's getting angry. Malcolm fucking hates carrying cash but either Sam'll put it on expenses, or there might even be a Ministerial car fee. He's mentally checking for keys and wallet while he answers the question. "Aye, except with blood."  
  
There's another pause, and suddenly Jamie's body wrenches against him. "Are you telling me you're fucking _dying_?"   
  
His face has fucking crumpled. His face has fucking _crumpled_. He looks so confused, and so _frightened_ ,  that suddenly all Malcolm's good work is undone by Malcolm himself. He finds himself wrapping his arms round Jamie, and around Jamie's terrified babble, promising no, haud your whisht, Jamie, haud your fuckin' whisht, while a low realisation occurs that this is worse than the cancer. Infinitely worse. Jamie reiterates his fucking disbelief, argues and struggles, until Malcolm can explain no, he's not dying _now_ , hopefully not for another hundred fucking years or however long it takes Jock Stein to come back from Avalon, _Jamie_ , don't -- and that no, the chemotherapy is apparently not working. It's not shrinking anything.   
  
Jamie jerks away and tries to kick the fucking wall down, without rising. Malcolm drags him back. He can hear himself explaining that the first go not working isn't incompatible with fucking survival, it just means he has to keep going, and up the dosage, and Jamie, Jamie, please.  
  
He ends up drenched in sweat, Jamie wrapped around him like a terrified octopus, slipping exhausted into the beginnings of a dreadful sleep. Jamie's toed his shoes off and is staring at the ceiling. With that fucking uncanny timing that probably made people think him possessed, as a child, Jamie speaks just as Malcolm's beginning to pass out.  
  
"I won't let you go. You'll be wasting your fucking time."  
  
Minutes pass, in which they both stay where they are. When bone-deep exhaustion starts in his marrow and radiates out, Malcolm agrees to use his last bit of strength worse mentioning to get upstairs, and undress, and fall asleep in Jamie's bed.  
  
\----  
  
Eight hundred yards from Jamie's flat, in a very similar part of London, Sam is wide awake and rehearsing her confession. Malcolm has to know, not only because he's the one person who can _sort it_ , but because otherwise he'll find out from Julius, or tea leaves, or a terrible political-filth-spin osmosis. She must confess. She has had dinner with Julius Nicholson _again_ , and during that dinner, he placed his hand upon her knee. She doesn't know if she acted through sympathy, or depression, or a late-flowering desire to sleep in a comfortable country house where nobody shouts and the children smell of lavender.   
  
In Malcolm's office, to have dinner with Julius Nicholson once might be called a contravention of the Official Secrets Act, but to do so twice can only get you shot while kneeling in front a suitcase.  
  
Fine. Malcolm would never shoot a woman. She may be sacked. But now Julius has got her address, and there's a hideously flamboyant purple arrangement sitting in her vestibule, which would look terribly priapic and gay to anyone not conviced of flowers' blanket efficiency as a missile of heterosexist courtship.  
  
Anyone, in other words, not Julius.   
  
Her phone rings. For the seventy-fifth time that day, it's him.  
  
It's not that she thinks he's sweet, or safe, or anything other than a big bald pointy shark. It's because, outrageous tactical moment-of-madness lapse _aside_ (about which, Sam reflects, Malcolm cannot really complain, having been bumming _Jamie_ for years - at least Julius has met the Queen and didn't bite her), years of proximity to Malcolm Tucker have imbued Sam's natural intelligence with political genius. Her spidey-sense of imminent intrigue is tingling.  
  
Her tone, when she answers, is  cautious.  
  
"Baron Arnage?"  
  
"Samantha, please, don't be preposterous." It's said in the gentlest tones of hurt and distress. "That's cold, Samantha, quite cold. I had so hoped we could call each other friends." He has, after all, put a hand on her Aristoc 40 denier, thinks Sam, wryly, and with no increase in fondness.  
  
Sam exhales. It reminds Julius, in some frighteningly Oedipal way, of m'dame back at Eton, and he hurries into an explanation. "I was wondering if Malcolm had named a successor."  
  
"Mr. Tucker will be maintaining a portfolio of Press and Communications projects from home," she cuts in smoothly, squaring her shoulders and stretching into a more authoritative position. She is noticeably cooler, vowels crisping and acquiring the slightest suggestion of hauteur. "Day-to-day activities within the Department will be coordinated by Jamie Macdonald."   
  
She hears Julius give way to a delicate exhale of disappointed disapproval. She knows he means to convey hurt, sadness and a vaguely pedagogical dismay. All Sam can do is bite her lip and endeavour not to call him a prat. Further pause on the other end suggests he's eating a biscuit. For some reason she finds that endearing. Is she, perhaps, ovulating?   
  
What if he children got his hair?  
  
"I'm afraid James doesn't have the requisite number of ticks. The PM has authorised me to authorise Steven Fleming to -- "  
  
"Fuck," says Sam, very loudly and distinctly. It is a syllable of unadulterated horror.  
  
"Well, I absolutely cannot condone your language," says Julius, an entirely hypocritical remark coming from a man who's been in lust with Malcolm Tucker since 2007, "but I do agree that Steven's return, speaking with my policy hat adjusted just _so_ ,"  
  
"And your long-lensed hat," Sam can't help adding. Although she hopes her political epitaph will be 'ice bitch', rather than 'PM-skinning Nosferatu', occasionally channeling Malcolm's bravado is her best way of pretending she knows what'll happen next.  Probably Julius won't mind: after all, he almost certainly views her as a bizarre conglomeration of Malcolm's pheromones and the necessary vagina. Julius is spluttering, and the resultant staccato suggests expectorated Hobnob.  
  
"Yes, all right, it would perhaps mean a government micro-climate of less than temperate - anyway, if you could kindly reach James by methods other than those traditionally placed at my disposal," (trans: Jamie wouldn't answer his phone to Nicholson unless doing so would remotely douse Nicholson with shit), "it would be welcome. The PM's moving towards the implementation of a new Legacy policy -- "  
  
" -- hold on," says Sam, creeping sleepiness gone. "Legacy? So it's definite, then? This Recess, and Conference -- "  
  
" -- I am not at liberty to say. And you might have said you liked the flowers."  He hangs up, evidently in high dudgeon, and Sam is just grateful he's cleared the line. Unsure which borderline-psychotic-Scotsman most merits her first call, she hesitates a second before leaving a message on Malcolm's phone (old habits die hard, and it's not like Jamie'd keep it from him anyway). By the time Scotland's angriest men start calling back, she's on the phone to Nicola Murray.  
  
\----  
  
"Right." Malcolm's eyes gleam. He's sitting up in Jamie's bed, wearing nothing but a pair of Jamie's pyjama bottoms, with all the lines and hollows of his body in sharp, blue relief. "We need a candidate. They'll be going into fucking meltdown tomorrow."  
  
(The only way to deal with emotional intimacy is to pretend it never happened. They've both had a stiff drink since. Sitting up in bed planning political fuckery feels  normal.)  
  
"One sniff of a Last Reshuffe and its MP diarrhoea all over the Westminster dinnerplate," agrees Jamie, happily. Malcolm gives him a look of inexpressible distaste. Waking up was harder than he expected, especially when the sound of his Blackberry had to compete with Jamie berating whoever had the fucking audacity to phone him (and then getting sweary and offended when it was Sam).  
  
"How the fuck were you working in PR?"  
  
"Fuck's the operative word. That, and McCulloch found out I had a trial for Rangers." Nothing can blunt Jamie's happiness, just for this moment. They've spread out the duvet, scoring off sections with chopsticks and biros in a rather stickier recreation of Stewart Wankface's Implementation Matrix. Various small objects have been placed in various squares, each representing a different candidate. It was a burst of frenetic energy Jamie rather enjoyed, even if the effort of barracking orders at him meant that Malcolm's asthma flared. Now Jamie's sitting cross-legged opposite him, occasionally rubbing Malcolm's back or chest or otherwise invading his personal space in a characteristically sloppy, insubordinate fashion that Malcolm is willing to tolerate.As of tonight.   
  
"Right." Jamie picks up his Keir Hardie toothmug. "Sam Freeman."   
  
"Mouth's too big."  
  
"Jesse Harper?" He waggles a novelty keyring in the shape of a ballet shoe. Malcolm's often wondered why Jamie seems to have so much female detritus around his flat (there's been a bottle of Chanel No. 5 in the cupboard for two years, now) but has never liked to ask.  
  
"Not after fucking Foetusgate," he decides, attention already focussed on the Graeme Sounness figurine by Jamie's knee. "What about Gillian Grason?"  
  
Jamie looks incredulous. "What, Gillian Gagbag? Aside from her considerable beard problem, she's been O.B.N. for Fleming ever since he stopped her bent bender of a husband taking up the shitter for ten years in Dartmoor." Malcolm slumps, rubs a hand over his eyes. Jamie can suddenly see the bruise from the IV line, and wants to stop, but this has to be decided and there's no way Malcolm won't want to keep going. "Don't you remember? Brighton nineteen-fucking-ninety-nine, I thought -- "  
  
"Yes, of course I fucking remember, Jamie, Christ." He's struggling, though, Jamie can see, powerless and angry as his brain starts to splinter along with his body. "Fleming kept looking down her top. That conference room."  
  
"I fucked you over Byron Briers' policy desk," adds Jamie, sounding absurdly cheerful, and there's a flicker of lust as well as embarrassment in the annoyed glance Malcolm sends his way.   
  
Jamie's eyes stay light, but his pulse is racing: then Malcolm coughs  - Jamie wants to punch the internet, fucking Google said chemo could reduce asthma symptoms - and Derek Morris's leadership hopes end forever as Jamie tosses him across the bed (in the form of Malcolm's missile horror of an inhaler).   
  
Malcolm takes two puffs, and his lungs clear. He does have a better inhaler at home, but loses it regularly as a point of principle. Jamie watches him closely. "Malc, if you're tired, i - "  
  
"If we stop doing this now, Steve fucking Fleming will be trimming his fucking facepubes at my desk by lunch tomorrow. Who's left?"  
  
"Jim Fisher, Laurence Meakin, Louisa Andrews and Alex Roache."  
  
"Too old, too fat, too obviously psycho and too much of a fucking lush."  A teaspoon, a still-wrapped Ginsters, a Daffy Duck eraser and a cardboard coaster reading "Vote Jones - For The Union You Deserve"  all disappeart. Malcolm peers. "Who's the Jolson CD by your foot"  
  
"That's not fucking Jolson, you stupid cunt! That's Conley! Jesus Christ, do you think I'd waste the fucking Governor on some sad sack from Transport?"   
  
"Which one, the big tit with the mantits, or the girl with the hairy forehead? Christ, is that everyone?" Malcolm's tone is scathing, and Jamie looks pugnacious.  
  
"We could wax her face. We've got fucking months before the PM starts packing up the gimp masks and gets out. She'd be all right after a bit." Malcolm's eyes are wandering again, though, and Jamie thinks he might be on some anti-carcinogen-fuddled promise until Malcolm reaches forward and snatches Exhibit H, a sealed pack of Durex taken from Jamie's bottom drawer. On the Matrix, this signifies Nicola Murray.   
  
Jamie starts blaring his customary protest. "Oh yeah, fucking naturally you want _her_. Why don't you just ask her to marry you, fuck that mealy-mouthed cunt of a husband, never mind he's built like a brick shithouse and she probably keeps her womb round her ankles, just get sprogged up and complete the Pat Phoenix fantasy."  
  
"Don't be such a dick, a hospice is no place for a lady. Listen," Malcolm seethes, brandishing the Durex. "She's a vicious political brain dressed in the ladywife tweeds of Jaeger. She's significantly less crooked than the droolers, drug addicts, fornicators and - at the last count - _three_ fucking alcoholics you've suggested so far. And thirdly, she _knows_ I am much cleverer than she is. She'll do what I fucking say. I'll tell her tomorrow."  
  
"You'll be fucking unconscious tomorrow."  
  
Malcolm considers this. It's true that his left eye is pulsing, and his mouth tastes of nitrates, and every ball-and-socket on his skeleton feels like a trolley's been over it at least five times. "The day after tomorrow. I'm going to sleep." He lies down.  
  
Jamie sighs, contemplates the clean-up, then avoids it by just tipping the duvet off the bed. This makes the pie, inexplicably, unwrap and explode, and leaves Malcolm looking shivery and resentful. A moment of sheer exhausted panic wells up in Jamie: nobody's given him such responsibility since his last daughter was born.   
  
"Put that on," he says, throwing him a ratty navy dressing-gown instantly rejected under normal circumstances. Then he gets down on his knees and starts picking fucking disgusting pastry innards off his ancient grey bedding.   
  
When he looks back up, Malcolm's got his eyes shut, hunched beneath the bathrobe with his cheek on his hand. That does weird fucking things to Jamie's own innards, like knotting them tighter back into a fistful of anxiety wherein he'll spends moth popping an artery in the name of keeping Britain together, but Fleming  _still_ wins and Malcolm _still_ dies. Giving up, he arranges the duvet with the dripping end at his own feet, and climbs in beside him. He rests his forehead against the back of Malcolm's neck, kisses between his shoulderblades like he had downstairs.  
  
An elbow, its dimensions honed by cancer to the proportions of a top-grade bayonet, shoots back and sticks him in the ribs.   
  
"Fuck off, Jamie. I'm trying to fucking sleep."  
  
The elbow is genuine fucking regulation issue for child-soldiers in fucking Kosovo, so he rolls off and stares at the ceiling and wonders why, since he's such a fucking reasonable human being ( _note: Jamie genuinely believes this_ ), he's only ever fallen for a Catholic schoolgirl with a nun up her arse (psychologically speaking), and a maleveolent skeleton with five personality disorders and skull sticking out the back of his hair.  
  
All the times Malcolm went for chemo. And the lies about the fucking operation. It's not like Jamie can _change_ anything now: do more than drop him off behind tinted windows, the press'd line the route and Claire's stupid cunty brothers (why did posh girls, even posh girls from Glasgow, invariably come equipped with two meaty brothers in jumpers to whom they invariably fucking defer) would call up fucking Monty and Meatsack at Freshfields, and Jamie'd never see his kids again.   
  
He lies there for another long moment, deliberating. Then he rolls back and replaces himself, exactly as before, and this time Malcolm doesn't fight, even when Jamie wraps a hand around a bare hipbone and turns him. He doesn't look directly at Jamie, but he does kiss him, unprompted, which is fucking unprecedented as far as recent memory's concerned, and in Jamie's book worthy of note until they're dead.   
  
Then he closes his eyes and presses his face against Jamie's neck, which is all right because nobody except Jamie can see him, and somewhere between that and the sleep deprivation, Malcolm falls asleep to Jamie's quiet rant about how he'll save Malcolm's job and gut the press and bury Steve Fleming and fuck cancer into submission with a dildo of frozen Tory bits, all on the sole and unassailable condition that Malcolm stays. By which, Malcolm supposes, Jamie means 'does not die'.   
  
Malcolm wakes up in the morning to Jamie swearing and tripping over the duvet. The sun on his face, through the window, he's relieved to be upholding the bargain, so far.  
  
\----  
  
Jamie and Sam spend the next two days guarding Malcolm's office like it's the inner citadel or sanctum of some private, frightening religion. Which.   
  
So determined is Jamie to act as a round-the-clock barricade for Malcolm against the forces of Fleming (Malcolm has sworn that when he gets word that Fleming's in his fucking chair, he'll rip the IV from his arm, ride through the Downing Street windows on a Harley, cut out his own tumour with a teaspoon, and jam it down Steve Fleming's throat) that he makes all the Caledonian Mafia drag desks and desk chairs into the office, in the misplaced belief that if there's enough Scottish aggression right at the beating heart of politics (a.k.a., the one-hundred-and-forty-four square feet of Malcolm's pristine, terrifying creation), the ravens won't leave the Tower of London, and Everything Will Be Fucking Okay.   
  
After Julius Nicholson's first foray into the office (Orange Nuts for breakfast, laburnum for Sam), Jamie goes into a towering rage and has to spend forty minutes locked in the pantry. Sam's not sure what gave her the idea, except that her sister watches a lot of Supernanny. Funnily enough, it's Glenn Cullen (Malcolm's brother from another _fucking_ mother, that's who) who explains very quietly why Julius is not currently a man to antagonise, showing a low-key awareness of the political scene and, with delicacy and in language veiled, making the point that everybody really will find out (all right, _strongly suspect_ ) that he and Malcolm are fucking. Everybody. Really. Unless Jamie can hold it together.  
  
Jamie takes this news with uncharacteristic quietness. Even so, just after eleven, he walks into Julius's office and tries to hit him on the head with a chair. This would be enough to send Julius over to the Dark Side, except that the Dark Side is rapidly disintegrating: Sam keeps making housecalls, and if the Voldemort contingent are mildly terrified to find Malcolm's Assistant outside their door, they positively shit themselves upon realising that Sam can be psycho _all on her own_.    
  
Malcolm leaves Jamie a message at lunchtime, saying he's gone home. He doesn't say that he's been sick in the basin, or that walking to the corner shop for Jeyes' fluid 1 was the most tiring experience of his life. Limping back along the quiet, residential road (wearing Jamie's fucking _parka_ to avoid the non-existent paps) Malcolm had lent on the fences and remembered all the time he's spent running around Richmond Terrace, Downing Street - even, on occasion, Washington D.C. Now he's feverish and coughing up froth.  
  
There aren't any paps on the doorstep, either; this is, of course, because Jamie's signed an injunction, forging Malcolm's signature with incredible efficiency under Sam's watchful eye.2  
  
Malcolm interprets their absence as a sign of his new futility, and the low rumble of sunstruck depression continues as he tries to obey the doctor (new doctor, NHS fuck, now it's all BBC-approved and positive) and Jamie's injunctions to get some sleep. For the first time in months, his Blackberry bears only two voicemails: a tabloid, asking him if he'd like to write a column on Living With Not Dying From, and (second only to the former Mrs Tucker is horror engendered), his Aunty May.  
  
When Jamie gets home, Malcolm is engaged in a row so blistering, using a Glaswegian accent so venomous that only Jamie would understand any words at all. From what he can gather, the Tucker clan have called to offer their concern, and Malcolm (rightly or wrongly) has interpreted this as avaricious fucking disappointment that their cross-country meal ticket might be spending all little Fergal's rehab money and little Zsa Zsa's bail on expensive headscarves and palliative care. He throws his Blackberry so hard that it shatters. His first words to Jamie are "You'd better hope that SIM card's not broken", followed by a slow limp upstairs and a bolt on the bedroom door.  
  
Jamie calls Sam at three, from the landing, where he's lying underneath a hand-woven Indonesian throw and drinking a can of Monster. It's his version of devotion: he sounds soused, and sad, and on the other side of the locked door, Malcolm itches with rage and leaves more hair on the pillow.  
  
Two nights later, Jamie comes through the door to instant, _direct_ attack: Malcolm called him that afternoon, and got no reply. Jamie doesn't like to say Sam had locked him in the pantry again, as a result of trying to give the PM a Chinese burn (he's still refusing to name the Legacy project, or offer more than  a mild and fatuous smile in the direction of a successor). Moreover, Malcolm looks like shit, and Jamie really does try to shut up.  
  
But he's half-drunk on adrenaline, the way they both used to be, and as they stand in Malcolm's doorway, Malcolm can see him gleaming with energy, youth and power.  
  
Accordingly, Malcolm's response to conciliatory guilt (Jamie offers to make him 'a cup of tea', a beverage which Malcolm has never drunk, and does not keep in the house) is to accuse Jamie of a) "fucking loving this" and b) wanting to take his job, permanently.   
  
It should still be impossible to forget how ill Malcolm is; he's entirely bald now, from the back at least, and his shrunken face is such that Jamie genuinely cannot remember the last time Malcolm had lips. But with the full force of Malcolm's superior height and concentrated venom coming across the house in waves, Jamie cannot remember to be lenient. When Malcolm scoffs out that he supposes Jamie will jizz on his grave, Jamie throws his briefcase at a mirror and says yeah, he fucking intends to, none of it fucking matters any more.  
  
"Do you think I fucking care? I'd go down the fucking Jobcentre _tomorrow_ , if -- "  
  
The glass splinters for an impressively long time, and even Malcolm is temporarly quiet. Then he's following Jamie through the house, shouting at him for being an ungrateful bastard, who doesn't deserve the greatest job this century and who'll always be what he's always been. Which, among other things, Malcolm identifies as "a jumped-up Motherwell piss-stinking hack".  
  
He follows Jamie from handhold to handhold, leaning on the furniture Jamie's subtly rearranged. The route runs out at the stairs, Jamie a few steps up and breathing as raggedly as Malcolm.  
  
"Cancer or no cancer, you're  on the fucking sofa tonight."  
  
"I'll sleep on the fucking bed."  
  
" _Good_ luck getting up the stairs alone," Jamie calls, real hatred in his voice as he climbs and disappears from sight.   
  
When Malcolm goes back to the sofa, it's to think about the hour he's already spent lying on the bathroom floor, unable to grip the glass doors or the slippery chrome sink, and - for the stretch of that hour - too embarrassed, and too weak, to crawl the length of the landing to his bedroom. Jamie doesn't know, of course, and even now some bit of Malcolm recognises Jamie'd cut off his own wrist (like that _other_ famous psycho) to get those words back unsaid.   
  
When they go together to chemo in the morning (8 a.m. slot; Jamie's got to dash off straight after), Jamie's still angry enough to overlook how miserably ill Malcolm appears. When he sends Glenn and Nicola round that afternoon, it's an act of political expediency (a half-dead Malcolm still briefs future PMs better than anyone with a white blood count) as much as kindness.   
  
Still, Jamie's twitchy when they come back, re-routing them via Downing Street for a debrief that Glenn spends in sombre silence, and Nicola in red-eyed unease. When Glenn finally does open his "great saggy cavern of a political cakehole", it's to ask, very seriously, like a 30s illustration of some tubercular headmaster, whether Malcolm has any family he should be seeing.   
  
It's a windy, stertorious and chilling suggestion, and Sam has to come and lock Jamie in the pantry again. Five minutes later, Jamie is called to a Legacy meeting (his fifth in six days, none of which have achieved anything except a series of Fleming-Macdonald discussions, i.e. loosely disguised spitting contests), so Sam has to unlock him: all rage gone, Jamie begs Sam to just _go round there_ , and to stay with Malcolm until he gets home. It's only a couple of weeks until the fucking recess - last-minute reshuffle or not, the PM can't resign until back-to-school time, and - so Jamie finds himself explaining - if Malcolm can just fucking _hang on_ , Jamie will get this sorted.3  
  
Sam departs and Jamie stands there, reeling. He can't be grooming that podgy bint in a my-husband-and-I skirt suit for power. He can't be running this department alone. Just to keep their heads afloat, he's been raiding Malcolm's blackmail catalogues at the rate of one Shad. Cab. polaroid a day, but even _Tories_ can't keep wearing blackface and fishnets forever, and then, what will he do?  
  
\----  
  
When Sam gets round there, Malcolm's incoherent from the effort of beating apart the DAB radio Glenn's lent him, and which is (or, rather, was) apparently stuck on Test Cricket. He's wearing clothes now so oversized he looks like he's borrowed them from his dad, is chewing ice-chips like caffeine pills, and has guessed Jamie's password to order himself a new Blackberry.   
  
Various lentil-eaters have sent him hideous, hideous bandanas, all with garish patterns that'll unquestionably make him look like a pinhead. Sam promises to dispose of them all discreetly; Terri, however, has sent a plain black one, which she privately retains. He seems, however, to be in better spirits - apparently he made a couple of jokes that really offended Glenn, and promised visits from Keith Langley, Gillian Grason, Maurice Gilbert and Fatty lead to self-congratulatory remarks about the new Secret Parliament. He's even up to discussing what kind of chip he should get implanted in the back of Jamie's neck, the better to track his endless downward spiral through the Press corps of a once-great nation. His colour's better, too; an almost rosy, bronzed look along the long lines of his cheekbones, and, despite looking something like a medical student's model skeleton, he rallies enough to insist he helps Sam make the tea.

 

Apparently, he also has the energy to call Julius a "shiny, lunar cunt" when the latter announces his arrival by a jocular tattoo on the door. "I should be taking tips from him, eh, get him to model those headscarves?" he grins, apparently unabashed by any memories of their last meeting. Sam, remembering _her_ last meeting with Julius, only musters a weak smile.   
  
Julius comes through the door like a cross between a nervous schoolboy and a big, slick cat. In pinstripes. Carrying a purple bouquet of enormous flowers.   
  
There is a deafening silence of horror while Sam thinks they might be for her. Unfortunately, it is during this silence that Malcolm looks at her more closely.   
  
His voice emerges as from a crypt of inpenetrable darkness.  
  
"You've fucked her."  
  
"No!" Two parallel screams emerge, of which Julius's is unquestionably the girliest. Malcolm had dropped back onto the sofa before receiving Julius (he's been sitting down rather a lot), and he peers up at the 'you' of his statement with terrifying hate.   
  
What he sees there doesn't convince him. He glances at Sam, who is maroon, miserable, and rooted to the spot.   
  
"...you've _tried_ to fuck her." He sounds doubtful.  
  
"I -- " In the disastrous impulse of the moment, Sam actually wills Julius to lie. This is, of course, suicidal: you never lie to Malcolm, he always knows, and it's the best of a bad situation when Julius simply splutters and wavers too long. Malcolm almost howls with fury.  
  
"Jesus Christ! Why didn't you fucking tell me about this?" He swipes a hand over his hair, except there's no hair where hair should be. "This is a Grade A diplomatic incident, and you - you fucking bender - " whipping his attention back to Julius, " - don't you fucking _breathe_ on her again, Jesus. I don't know if this some last-ditch attempt to clutch on to the shreds of whatever Bullingdon bisexuality you think you're mastering, but not my fucking PA. Okay?"  
  
"Malcolm," says Sam, tremulously. "I am actually _in the room_."  
  
It's the first time Julius has seen him look abashed. "I know, pet, I know." He mutters two syllables that might be the unbelievable 'sorry'. He sighs. "Look, if you want to fuck the shiny lunar ballbagging sucker, I'll buy the lube, but in the long run, wouldn't it be better if I killed him and you became a dyke, instead?" Julius utters a gasp of protest. Malcolm shakes his head. "This is not fucking on. Not you two. And Christ, he's one of those upstairs --"  
  
" -- I didn't _tell him anything_ , Malcolm, are you - Malcolm?"   
  
Malcolm is struggling to swallow a mouthful of tea. His eyes are wide and watering, his throat contracting around the hot liquid like he's trying to process a mouthful of bark. He's wincing, arm shaking as he tries to stretch out to put down the cup again. Sam darts in to settle it, perching on the coffee table; Julius hands her a coaster with more astuteness than she'd given him credit for.  He starts to wheeze and cough.   
  
And the he's sick. Down his shirt. Tea spilling back up, over his chest and his collarbones, and Sam starts to be seriously alarmed when Malcolm can't spare more than a second for horror, before heaving again. Sam realises he's not vomiting, but choking. Julius produces a handkerchief and tries to staunch it; Malcolm's skin feels like boiling water, and they stop exchanging worried looks and start ringing for an ambulance.   
  
He's going badly downhill by the time the ambulance arrives, hand on his side and a febrile tenderness to his skin. Snapping the oxygen mask over his face (Sam's reeling off his list of pre-existing conditions, voice unnaturally steady on 'asthma' and 'cancer') the paramedics are more than disconcerted when he sucks in a massive breath, wrenches the mask away and gasps (to the pretty girl, and the posh bald man they've seen smarm on the telly) not to tell Jamie.  
  
As they load Malcolm into an ambulance, ready to speed him away, siren blaring, this doesn't seem like a realistic prospect. Sam has to decide, instantly, whether Malcolm would rather die with Julius by his side, or have a direct political order disobeyed. "Get in the ambulance," she barks at Julius, and such is the icy authority in her voice (reminiscent, in a very real sense of both m'dame _and_ Matron) that Julius knows himself to be a _very naughty boy_ , and obeys.  
  
When the siren's blare becomes a whine behind the trees and the traffic, Sam lets herself back into Malcolm's house, unlocks his cabinet and pours herself four fat fingers of whiskey.   
  
Then she gets a taxi back to Westminster, assisting the Government's attack-dog-turned-chieftain through the first Legacy marathon that actually means something, a quick bloodletting over at Health, and a bit of an At Home during which Colin Whittingley-Walpole from Education goes the pretty peach-pink of his adulterous new wife's lipgloss. After Wee Willie Winkie leaves with the divorce papers Sam put together (her BA was in Law, as it happens) yesterday lunchtime, Sam rechecks her lists against the diary, confirming Jamie has no urgent appointments for the rest of the day.  
  
Then she clears the office, locks the door, and tells him about Malcolm.  
  
\----  
  
1 Jamie, the human tornado, delegates housework to a very expensive, twice-weekly cleaner and accordingly owns no cloths, mops, or bleach. Malcolm has incredible fucking guilt about his cleaner but finds he's allergic to most household products.  
  
2 Sam has forged Malcolm's signature countless times, usually on repeat prescriptions or condolence letters. She's happy to help.  
  
3 Whether Jamie means 'the state of the country' or 'the cancer' is unclear.


	5. Who killed the Kennedys?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for character death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to everybody who's stuck with the fic this far. I hope you're happy with the ending. Warnings for character death.

INT. HOSPITAL (DAY & NIGHT)  
  
It takes them forty-eight hours to stabilise Malcolm: thirty to get rid of the massive infection he's developed during chemotherapy, and a further eighteen to deal with the infection he catches from the feeding tube. Two days later, faced with a choice between becoming a human hemorrhage and surviving, he apparently opts for the latter.   
  
This is a good thing, because the chemotherapy hasn't shrunk the tumour _at all_ ; now "slightly bigger on one side", as the specialist (whom Jamie tries to kill) casually explains, it's putting pressure on Malcolm's intestinal wall. If something's not done, it'll mean - at best - changing the direct debit from CCC to a Hodgkins charity, and, at worst, a fucking hospice and a funeral in a fortnight.1 If they do operate, one mistake means, well, squeezy lemons.  
  
Susan Tucker, a lovely, petite woman with Malcolm's blue eyes and absolutely none of his venom, starts to go grey at this (so Jamie tries to kill the specialist again), and an operation is scheduled. The operation which the surgeons had previously deemed unsafe, and for which Jamie was meant to be in Lebanon.  
  
It is not completely Susan's decision. She asks Jamie what Malcolm would most wish them to do, which Jamie pretends to consider before responding to the screaming terror in his stomach and saying oh, Malc'd definitely want it, definitely, besides, it's not like the fucker's eaten much recently _anyway_. Then he goes to the bathroom and has one of his many muttering swearing sessions with God. These always devolve from wheedling into the kind of erratic, priest-from-the-Omen behaviour that, if witnessed, gets people locked up.  
  
It's unfortunate that the only times Malcolm's spoken all week were to mutter something dire-sounding about James Murray, and to insist Julius fly Jamie to Palestine. Both times his eyes were shut, and both times Jamie was right in front of him.  
  
It's another thirty-six hours before Malcolm's strong enough for the op happen. Jamie spends the period of surgery wondering if he's actually just killed him. And remembering one of their nastier rows during the chaemo; "Why have I fucking got it?" Malcolm asked. "You're the one who smokes."  
  
Malcolm, or something like it, reemerges on a trolley two hours later than expected. There was a bleed.  
  
Overnight, his temperature goes sky high. Jamie, who has been there for as many hours as Sam thinks they can get away with, puts this down to Malcolm's fucking bloody-mindedness and dares anyone to disagree with him. When Sam evicts him from the hospital, he circles between Departments on auto-bollock, witless in the face of constant news, constant fuck-up.  
  
It's a further day before Malcolm's anything like awake. Virtually nobody of note has been to see him, possibly because Jamie  has threatened to gut any fucker who carries germs inside the sterile, perfect haven of Malcolm's recovery room.   
  
Against expectations, the surgical team remove all the tumour. Jamie insists the operation be explained to him, before and after, in excruciating medical detail, swigging Tesco own-brand Red Bull and demanding Sam translate the obnoxiously Latin bits.2 He keeps a little dictaphone and disconcerts the surgeon by playing his words back at inappropriate moments. He's been spending his off hours hacking university databases to memorise the worse kinds of medical articles.3 The upshot is that Malcolm's not going to be expanding his diet any time soon, nor should his nearest and dearest expect to see him looking plump and portly any time before the Resurrection. But the tumour is out. The cancer not spread. His digestive system looks like it's designed by Heath Robinson, and he's got a scar that looks like someone took a pair of compasses and a stapler to him, then gave up and just ploughed away with a chainsaw.   
  
Malcolm wakes up a week after a cup of tea nearly killed him, and doesn't know where he is. When he starts to recognise who's with him, he asks (almost) at once for a copy of the daily papers. His eyes are crusted, his scalp bald except for a few trailing strands. Sue, near his head, reaches out and strokes his temple. He smiles at her, then asks the room in general for the title of the PM's Legacy.  
  
"Strategy for Peace," Jamie says proudly, leaning forwards and grinning ecstatically through caffeine-crack eyes and a day-old beard (which on Jamie is the amount of hair normal men produce in a week). "Fuck the terrorists on our own turf."   
  
In the early-morning sunlight, backlit by halogen and an anorexic London skyline, he looks like an illuminated illustration of a burglar redeemed by the Salvation Army. Malcolm gives him a look of exhausted contempt, which poorly disguises relief. Jamie could honestly say something really fucking stupid to him, right then.  
  
"Strategy for Peace," Malcolm rasps, closing his eyes. "We can all expect to be blown up in about ten fucking minutes, then."  
  
"You missed the reshuffle." Jamie can't help himself. "Fatty's got Health - yeah, I know - Meakin's Education and Nicola's still where she is."  
  
"Good," says Malcolm, sleepily. "That means they're running scared."  
  
1It wouldn't be that difficult to organise; Malcolm's will, signed five years ago, stipulates a private cremation, with ashes scattered off the same Caribbean island where, unknown to anyone except Sue and the passport authorities, they scattered the ashes of his mother.   
  
2 Sam reminds herself that she did once have a life: mother, father, stepbrothers, flatmates and The West Wing. Things that were not her grey-haired boss and the beating heart of politics.  
  
3 "She died six days after admission. Loops of ileum were matted together, and several[...]"  
  
\-----  
  
INT. MALCOLM'S OFFICE (DAY)  
  
"Christ, I'll be glad when the old fucker's back," Jamie says a fortnight later, shuffling papers at his (Malcolm's) desk and sounding as offhand as if he didn't finish a long and intimate row on the phone with him, five minutes earlier.  
  
Things are, it must be said, chaotic. The imminent approach of parliamentary recess (tomorrow) is provoking the usual rash of silly season stories and Parliamentary STIs. Glenn Cullen has evicted himself from DoSaC at the request of the bedridden Tucker ("Christ, the PM's lot are all foetal. We need an old fuck, someone fucking leaden enough to stop this Legacy blowing over like three dozen anorexic WAGhags") and is waving Legacy copy around like an elderly spinster.  
  
"Have you read this? Unbelievable shit. Codswallop. This is what comes of having a _Humanities_ PM."  
  
"This is what comes of having a PM who can't tie his own fucking shoelaces. Frankie, turn this into something I wouldn't be ashamed to shit on," Jamie, who doesn't quite know what Humanities _are_ , says, tosses the dossier across with an air so reminiscent of Malcolm that Sam wonders if their terrifying nocturnal practices (something on which she tries hard not to dwell) include Malcolm slowly cloning himself or rebuilding Jamie with Tucker DNA.   
  
With Jim Fisher having made a reassuringly mediocre fist of _Newsnight,_ and Nicola actually managing quite a spirited session on _Question Time_ (true, they'd had to send someone really dreadful as her co-pilot; Sam, in a rare anti-feminist moment, suggested Louisa Andrews on account of her annoying, trilling laugh), the softly-softly-fucky-fucky-get-Nicola-to-P

OWER campaign is going well.

The forces of mediocrity (Fleming) are trying to mass behind Laurence Meakin - eminently possible, given the man's walking semantic value as an answer to the age-old question, Who Ate All The Pies. However, both Malcolm and Jamie regard their efforts as pointless: the MP for South Kenwall will  _keep_ making those quasi-racist remarks on airwaves, and with Kenwall continuing to breathe extremist discontent all over Zone 5, Malcolm and Jamie are happy to let the Mirkins (or the Minges, as they're becoming known, though not in the broadsheets) piss on their own parades. They're taking bets as to what fresh hell the Conference will bring, and plotting, gleefully, to send Nicola down a day late: her photogenic People's Child Champions project (tiny heroic sick kids, and/or fruity girls doing F. Nightingale) comes to HD fruition on Day 1, splitting the media and creating an impression of energetic earnestness in contrast with the expenses bunfight in Brighton.  


  
Day 1 of the Conference duly dawns, and - with Jamie at Downing Street, briefing Nicola on how not to look like a fucking smug frumpy hairball in front of the Yummie Mummies - a bomb goes off in Meakin's Kenwall constituency. The Asian-run superclub is empty, but there's a fuckload of damage and nobody's sure whether the dodgy 'prayer group' with a lot of air miles, or the more visible and visibly stupid EDL chapter are to blame. The bomb itself is definitely a bodged job, a semi-failed first attempt, but the reverberations can be felt way beyond Westminster.

The Mingers immediately start heading back from Brighton, but not before Steve _fucking_ Fleming gets Meakin on the radio, where, Full English still repeating on him, he makes a speech so unutterably bad that Fleming has to cut him off halfway through, and start talking himself.

Apparently, it was the Muslims what done it. Well, okay, after fifteen years of private education, Meakin is (admittedly) slightly more articulate than that, but, in a very real sens,e one does have to _recognise_ that just as certain cultures do import very, you know, hateful, he's not afraid to, ah - and, to us, i _nexplicable_ \- views on women, so certain cultures and communities do ah, adhere to, ah, views that we find offensive, when it comes to, you know, the freedom of young people, to enjoy, to enjoying themselves, in, ah, Britain today, young British people, and so, ah, the situation, in, er, in Kenwall.

Back at the ranch, Jamie has a moment of not knowing whether to be delighted Meakin just committed political suicide, or terrified the greasy fuck's stupidity might be enough to bring down the whole Government. Then, Jamie listens in near-levitating horror as Fleming - the tiny sadistic men in his moustachioed brain apparently deciding now is the time to stamp win jackboots on his frontal lobe - attacks the radio presenter for attacking Meakin. Meakin is not a racist, because those aren't racist views, actually, Tony, but if they are racist views, they're not his views, but Meakin is however articulating the feeling at the very highest level of government (possibly because, Tony, he spends so much time actually working with the people, a logical leap lost on Jamie) and is basically only saying what _those fucks in social policy_ have told him.

By which, Jamie realises, he means Nicola Murray.

By which, Steve Fleming clairifies, he means Nicola Murray.

Nicola manages to stifle an immediate wail of terror (which, lips sealed, threatens to become a mouthful of vomit) as Fleming, kamikaze signoff interrupted by sound effects that suggest he's dragging Meakin from the studio by force, announces that the PM has in any case named Meakin as his successor. Officially, signed and sealed. Even allowing for the Conference Lads On Tour bus having stopped off in Columbia earlier than is historically normal, as political tactics go, this one is way off the fucking map. Nicola is now on record as a racist, Meakin is apparently PM-to-be, and Nicola, Glenn and Olly are standing looking at Jamie with absolutely no blood in their faces.

Which is when Malcolm charges in, fully Armani, cufflinks and tie, and wearing a plain black bandana. He's leaning heavily on a stick, and looks like he's just seen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or possibly the Four Minute Warning.

"Go to Brighton," he orders Jamie, in the voice of the old Malcolm - menace, venom and authority. Even after one glance at the limping, malevolent cancer patient, everyone feels better. There's no doubt he has a plan; there's suddenly something to do.

"Glenn? Go with him. Steve Fleming's clearly off his HRT. I printed off his resignation letter, just write the date in the wee box at the top." He draws a deep breath. "Create a road block on the M23, run over some cows, buy a labrador and release it onto the hard shoulder, but don't let him and Meakin get back to London. And get a lubricated bus stop and a roll of gaffa tape to cork the PM at both ends. I don't care _what_ he's actually said, I don't want his gullet pumping again this side of Christmas. Try a colouring-in book if nothing else works."  He hobbles over to the desk ( _Richard III_ , Glenn breathes, finally placing it), picks up the draft of Nicola's speech, skims it, then casts it disgustedly aside. Jamie is already putting his coat on, abusively chivvying Glenn to do the same. Malcolm glances at Olly and Nicola. He really does look like a pirate, Nicola realises, albeit an oddly vulnerable one, lopsided and pale, translucent on the sides of his skull.

"Foetus-boy." Olly looks defensive. "Step off that fucking coach in Brighton and you'll be fisted by twenty-nine politicos all trying to go native. You're staying. I may need someone to write something really fucking stupid, this afternoon."

"Are you sure you're -- ?"

Malcolm cuts Jamie off with a glare that has ended political careers.

"I will tear off your head and donate it to Sport Relief," he promises, almost conversationally. Jamie rolls his eyes. "If you see Julius, shit in his ear."

"Yeah, well, don't be too fucking handy, you're still fucking - all right, all right, come on Glenn, fancy a little detour via Beachy Head? Jesus, I hate going South."

They leave without Jamie and Malcolm looking at each other again; by the time the door's shut, Malcolm's dancing a tarantella with his shiny new Blackberry and booking the Press Departments of the known world to follow Nicola everywhere for the rest of the day. The big one is the Child Champions meet, two hours hence, at the primary school. But first, they're going to Kenwall. Malcolm writes the speech himself on the way over, ensuring Nicola ruins her perfect shoes on racially-motivated rubble before Meakin and Fleming can pass Crawley. Malcolm considers remaining in the car, unwilling to unbalance press focus during what is essentially Nicola's maiden speech: on the other hand, he doesn't trust Percy Weasley not to fuck this up for her, and the knowledge that he, Malcolm Tucker, is bloodied but unbowed and at work in the political arena, might well make Steve Fleming's head blow up.

Nicola actually cares about what she's saying, which Malcolm finds strangely endearing. The speech isn't terrible; she fluffs it once, categorically denies sharing any views or indeed _information_ with Meakin. Malcolm's added a few terrifying statistics about how little Meakin actually does, having decided that the fucking radge must be quietly beheaded, offstage left. It's hardly Elizabeth at Tilbury, but she gets by.

Plus, when a journalist soon to wake up dead in Thailand asks her point-blank how she feels about Meakin's coronation when everyone _knows_ she wanted the leadership, she actually looks righteously indignant and says for God's sake, a bomb's just gone off, I care that somebody's trying to kill the young people of this community.

She sounds so strident that for a second Olly thinks the journo might _apologise_.

And then she smiles sweetly, suggests that what Laurence needs to concentrate on is being an MP, not PM, and heads back to the car, Malcolm grinning evilly at her elbow.

Olly is momentarily left behind, caught in the flashbulb glare: but then he scurries to catch up, the convoy leaves, and the Press Departments of the Known World stop filming rubble and follow.

\-----  
  
INT. CAR. (DAY): INT. STATIONERY CUPBOARD (DAY)

It takes ninety minutes to get from London to Brighton, less when the driver is in the pay of Jamie F. P. Macdonald. There are times during the journey when Glenn is genuinely afraid.

It takes about fifteen minutes for Jamie to hobble Meakin and Fleming; Glenn takes upon himself the weighty responsibility of finding the Prime Minister a quiet corner (trans: stationery cupboard) and explaining, in words a child could understand and which he often used on Hugh, never, _ever_ to say things without checking with Malcolm first. In his exhiliration at conducting a one-on-one briefing with the PM (even a PM as unchinned and flapping as this one), he nearly forgets to include his explanation of why, even if the PM didn't _say_ Meakin was his successor, as far as history is concerned, essentially that's what happened. However, a shout from outside the stationery cupboard reminds him. Jamie's heading in.

"Jesus, hurry up, Cullen - hullo boss, changed your Tena Lady? Smashing - I need you to rewrite his fucking speech incorporating all the bits about Votes for Nicola in a way that doesn't transfer any of - " Jamie drops to mouthing, which the PM doesn't mind, because he's peering interestedly at the blocks of coloured post-its the Hotel Mayfair (Brighton) keeps in its stationery cupboard - " _his toxic crap_ ," - and back to bellowing - " - to her. Got that? Good."

The second bomb goes off just then. There's a shower of bright light, a scattering of plaster, then a slow, slow fade to black. The last thing Glenn hears is four hundred pencils falling off the shelves.

\-----

INT. CAR (DAY)

"Jesus Christ, wind down the window a second," says Malcolm. "I think I'm going to be fucking sick."

He isn't, of course, but his grey face stays there for some time, leaning across Nicola as he wills unexpected nausea into submission.

"More chemo?" Olly asks, and Malcolm croaks an affirmative. "Must be really nasty."

"Ah. Making sure it doesn't come back."

Nicola is shooting him vicious glares as best she can, but her view is obscured by Malcolm's shoulder.

"Yeah," Olly continues blithely, believing strongly that a bad silence is any silence, and not thinking at all about the verbal shit about to leave his mouth. "I had an aunt who had colon cancer."  
   
Malcolm sits back on the seat and gives Olly a look of lidded hate.

"Rewrite the fucking speech," he rasps, and breathes out.

  
**  
**\----  
  
EXT. SUNNY OAKS HOUSE, HARROW. (DAY) 

Nicola does splendidly throughout the little ceremony, enjoying the knowledge that these shots (bountiful/connected/maternal/authentic) will play incredibly well. Also, she does like kids, even if the spectacle of so much _good parenting_ triggers guilt.

 Olly and Malcolm flank her throughout, the latter - in what looks like a brilliant PR move, all the more so because unorchestrated - _not the only one in a bandana_. The spectacle of Malcolm, leaning on his crutch and grinning, with a rare lack of malevolence, at the contingent of kids wearing caps or hats or colourful scarves the opposite of his own, does funny things to Nicola's chest, none of which she can blame on half-a-glass-of-Cava, or the sunshine.

To his own surprise, Malcolm enjoys the first forty minutes of the visit enough to ignore the discreet buzzing of his Blackberry, which begins at the half-hour mark. Olly, essentially a far shallower and more selfish person, caves nearly at once. Malcolm's just starting to wonder why the journalists are turning on their phones and frowning, when Olly comes running up with a face like death. He stutters.

Nicola's first thought is honestly that Malcolm will faint. His teeth are gritted, eyes fixed, and he's white in the summer heat without a single possibility of colour. "Look fucking natural," he hisses, after a second, "and get me a fucking chair."

He's dialling before he sits down: Nicola's heart turns over in her mouth. She is trying to keep smiling at the children; Olly looks shocked and sober and is of course too young to remember the 70s, when Nicola started in politics and this happened all the time. Olly tries to answer her whispered questions, but Malcolm makes an angry gesture, lips pressing tighter and tighter before 10, Downing Street answers, and Sam, blessed Sam, comes on the line.

"How big is this?" All he asks, for a second. "Right." He passes his free hand over the front of his bandana, playing havoc with the knot. Nicola can see that he's trembling. "Start preparing the obits. No, all. Yes. Oh, come on Sam, you must have lined mine up enough fucking times by now. And Google me a fucking Tie Rack, mine's blue and Olly's is - hm?" He runs his eyes over Nicola with disconcerting intimacy and speed. "No, she's already the Black fucking Widow. For Christ's sake, Olly," he hisses, tugging the sheaf of paper in his hands, "Write something. Give her the lines. Fucking anything, they're waiting, just give her something to say. What?" He turns his attention back to the phone. "No, darling. No. Aye. Fucking... I don't know, _Harrow_ , we'll be two hours at best. For god's sake you stay where you are," he finishes, as if Downing Street were in Brighton and not far and safely away. Hanging up, he takes a moment to look over at what Olly's scribbling. Then he touches Nicola's hand.

"You do this," he tells her, like it's a promise. "You can do this. Just say what he tells you, then we'll go. Olly, get the fuck off the phone, I - "

"It's bad," breathes Olly, now all of twelve and beginning to panic behind his glasses. "Malcolm, it's really bad. Ben Swain's just been confirmed - he's. Half the hotel's gone. They're carrying bodies out in - "

"Too busy. Write. Bullet points, anything, fucking squiggles if you have to. This is the maiden speech of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, more or less, we've got all the fucking media and if you - if you turn on that fucking phone again before we get there, I'll bomb _you_. Ready?" He asks, turning on Nicola with unexpected savagery.

She is looking calmer than many women would be, and if Malcolm were any other man at any other moment, he might manage to love her for it. She nods, and - returning to the press, who have had their briefing and are beginning to clamour - keeps Olly's scribbled outline in one hand and a balled, tense fist in the other.

Malcolm manages to register that Olly's done pretty well in the time allowed. Nicola has passion, if not eloquence: Olly has managed some half-decent phrases. Malcolm tries, hard, not to think about what they're going to. Which is difficult, since obviously he can't do anything else.

\----  
  
INT. CAR (DAY)

All the way to Brighton, driving like maniacs, Malcolm refuses to be on the phone for longer than two minutes at a time. Louisa Andrews is dead. So is almost everyone else on the third floor. Malcolm thinks that Jamie probably wouldn't have had time to check in.

Olly and Nicola have both called Glenn about nine times, and he's not answering. Nicola is close to tears. She keeps thinking about Ben's stupid face and stupid book and _pointless_ lack of contribution to society and how ridiculous it is that he should die. At no point during the journey does Malcolm make an outgoing call, or check his voicemail.

They overtake several Outside Broadcast vans along the M23. Radio Hove is on the scene and have confirmed the destruction of the East Wing of the hotel; the kitchens, reception and one conference room is still standing. Flames are everywhere and Olly's report about bodies is true.

Derek Morris is dead, along with his PA (Olly feels suddenly sick - he used to take the same bus as her. He thinks she has a girlfriend, and wonders if anyone knows who, or how to find her. He's suddenly really glad Emma's a stupid Tory).

Malcolm shows absolutely nothing in his face; he even does Olly's tie for him, when the younger man's hands shake so badly. Sam rings back at Crawley with a list of the obits they'll definitely have to deal with - Malcolm passes the phone to Olly when it comes to noting names.

The traffic in Brighton is of course appalling; Nicola gets a phonecall from Terri saying that the survivors (a word she cannot make herself repeat to Malcolm) are gradually being transferred to the Marriott Conference Centre down the road, and would he prefer to go there? Malcolm makes a noise of contemptuous disgust and keeps staring out the window. The veins in the backs of his hands are jumping.

"Olly, fucking write something," he says quietly. "And in case he's too much of a fucking headcase, Nicola, work out what the hell you're going to say if he won't."

\---

EXT. HOTEL MAYFAIR (DAY)

The wreck of the Hotel Mayfair looks like a ruined castle, its presence signalled as much by the orange tape, flashbulbs and ambulances as by the great plume of smoke sweeping up towards the sky. The horizon, out at sea, is angry black. Half of Brighton is on the pavements, watching; there are iPhones and cameras.

Debris and oil have spilled down to the beach; a sweep of fire engines and hoses are getting in the way of the paramedics, who are piling stretchers, many loaded but unrecognisable, into several ambulances at once. There are still some bodies on the pavement, wrapped in beige hotel blankets. They are being guarded by someone who, from his bearing, might be one of Malcolm's Glaswegian staff. Malcolm turns abruptly away from him, scanning the crowds. Nicola recognises a few Cabinet Ministers, wandering around with blood on their faces. An uniformed official tries to drag them back - Malcolm flashes a security pass that Nicola feels sure he _just shouldn't have_ , then flips on his phone. "Sam. Put Fisher and Andrews up first, they're gone. Then Swain, make - make him sound all right, eh? And anyone who was on the third floor, I can't -- Jesus Christ, I'll call you back."

At their approach, the massed press - even the Outside Broadcast lot trying for a piece to camera - go wild. Nicola is honestly trying not to vomit ( _something_ went past, just now, into an ambulance, and she's fairly sure it was her Junior Minister); Olly, however, seems totally incapable of dragging up _any_ of his minor-public-school-bought _coping_ , so she drags him by the elbow and tries to get the attention of the guard. "Is there anything we can do?"

"Carpe diem," says Malcolm gruffly, by now raw with terror and rage. "I'm going to track these fucking murderous shites to their fucking holes and rip up every one of their throats. Christ Almighty." He is actually within range of a microphone, but the whole thing plays rather well on ITN, with Malcolm's heartfelt sentiments briefly winning him the sympathies of a nation. He is still in his bandana, still leaning on a stick. He hasn't stopped shaking since they got out of the car. Nicola can see him looking everywhere. All the phonelines have gone down, or are jammed completely.

As if Malcolm's blasphemy constitutes a Satanic whistle, a couple of the Press staff (not Jamie) suddenly emerge from the wreckage; Eachan and Fraser, stumbling over to Malcolm with blackened faces and voices of wheezy shock. Olly and Nicola find themselves helping the men down to the ground, shouting for assistance, and it stays with both how gentle Malcolm is, how tightly he holds their hands and how he promises they'll be okay now. And, of course, that he doesn't ask about Jamie.

After that, it takes all Malcolm's energy to keep matters moving and try to stay sane. Nick Hanway's brought past on a stretcher (also dead). Malcolm's too sick even to be there; one of the ambulances is giving him a dubious look and even the press aren't getting too close. About five minutes after their arrival, part of the kitchen roof caves in to a tiny, uncontrolled explosion. Olly jumps, and Nicola gives a yelp in the middle of her speech rehearsal, but Malcolm's hand is at her elbow and he doesn't falter once. The shadows are starting to lengthen; it's threatening rain beneath the sudden burst of heat.

Nobody else seems to have spoken to the press; everything is chaos and nobody knows where the PM is, or who's amongst the survivors. Eventually a few names start to be mentioned, but none of them are Jamie's. Because the phones are still jammed, when Malcolm starts to go a horrible grey colour and look blank in the eyes, Nicola drags Olly aside and tells him just to _run_ the two miles down the road to the Marriott, find out and come straight back again.

Apparently Steve Fleming is alive and well. This, Malcolm feels, is fucking typical.

He manages to stay calm and competent for as long as it takes Nicola to deliver Olly's speech and express condolences on behalf of the British Government to the families of the guests, Party members and hotel employees already known to have died. Her voice shakes beautifully on the message of British defiance. Malcolm just keeps remembering Jamie's face when he woke up in hospital. The first, very first thing he'd seen.

After some gas-and-air, Malcolm's Press boys are helping interrogate the survivors, rounding them into the coaches (Sam's organised those) and trying to check off some lists. Sam, in total and flagrant disobedience of everything Malcolm told her, has arrived from nowhere and is distributing lists of missing personnel. Malcolm is doing quite well until he sees her. Then he thinks his knees might give way.

He rallies again, until the moment Julius Nicholson walks out of the ruins with no glass on his glasses, tattered shirt-sleeves, a blackened face, and carrying a small child in his arms. Something about Julius's heroism is either too funny or too horrible to be borne, because Malcolm drops, holding Sam's hand in a razor-like grip. He does it with the minimum of fuss, but suddenly the two women have more than half his weight on their hands. Sam and Nicola exchange a look over Malcolm's head and get him onto the bus. He's not well. There is nothing more they can do.

\-----

INT. MARRIOTT HOTEL, BRIGHTON. (DAY)

The Brighton Marriott's staff are coping surprisingly well. Those Conference-goers not in immediate need of hospital care are receiving First Aid, water and blankets in the reception. It still feels more like a warzone than Britain, however; Malcolm, surveying the chaos with an ashen face, winces at the sight of MI5 suits, sifting through piles of bloodstained clothing and effects that have (for some reason) made it to the hotel.

The rain has started. Sam has just been given a list of something that is probably, from her expression, the confirmed dead and missing. Head down, she heads straight across reception, taking a pen and clipboard from her bag. Malcolm's visible tremors have been increasing for some time, but now he does what he's long been threatening to do: picks up his Blackberry, hits '2' on speed dial and more or less begs Jamie to be alive. He gets voicemail.

Nicola (who has given into the impulse and started crying, because she's just seen one of Clare Ballantyne's patented awful cardigans being zipped into an evidence bag) tries not to listen, averting her face from where Malcolm is whispering 'cunt, cunt' into the phone, but then a head is recognised at the end of the lobby, emerging from one door and threatening to disappear through another. It's sooty, and bruised, but visible even at this distance: it's Glenn Cullen, carrying a cup of tea.

Nicola bolts, clattering on the wet floor, shouting his name and allowing him only minimal time to transfer the cup to safety before she barrels into him, ecstatic wet hair and terrible skirt suit. She kisses him, quite hard, and stands there, holding onto him like a madwoman. He looks equal parts touched and disturbed, especially when she kisses him _again_ , and asks with a touch of hysteria if the tea (Glenn has even found a _spoon_ , bless him) is for anyone important.

"The PM," says Glenn, rather loudly (he, like most of them, has dreadful ringing in his ears) and Nicola gives a little gasp and shouts for Malcolm.

"Why aren't you dead?" is Malcolm's first and rather threatening greeting, skidding down the marble and brandishing his stick like it's a weapon (it was, of course, only a matter of time). The colour has come back to his cheeks.

"We were in a stationery cupboard!" Glenn says indignantly, clutching his cup and saucer (mismatched, he notices now) and trying to ignore the fact that while Nicola's laughing like a stage madwoman, Malcolm evidently wants to kill him. "It worked like a sort of - panic room, the structure protected us - I believe houses in the American South have a similar room for earthquakes."

"Is he this way?" Malcolm asks, beginning to hobble down the corridor, one fist full of Glenn Cullen's arm. Glenn resigns himself to spilling nearly everything and follows, Nicola scurrying alongside. Malcolm is already well beyond the velocity of any normal cane-user, moving towards the conference centre and Glenn's hurried direction. There is a lot of noise from within - talking, and shouting, that Malcolm cannot process at this distance (perhaps this tinnitus is contagious), but when Sam sticks her head round the door with red eyes and a grin, Malcolm blanches again and immediately quickens his pace.

iNT. CONFERENCE ROOM 1 (DAY)

In the middle of the carpet is a desk, and under the desk is Olly, crouched into a concertina and trying to plug in phones and printers, while avoiding the blows that keep threatening his limbs and back. Directly opposite is the PM, holding a copy of Horse & Hound and having stitches applied to a minor gash in his forehead.

There's a lot of furniture being moved, a lot of ancient phone wire being untangled, and, in the centre of the chaos, Jamie: blackened skin, torn shirt, the stubby remains of a tie and a great deal of dried blood on his ecstatic, grinning face. He is even grinning as he shouts orders. He looks like a psychotic chimney sweep enjoying a military coup. In the next room - visible through a connecting door - Johnny forces a television set into life, and there's a general cheer from the other, filthy, battered workers. They are all the Press & Comms department, Nicola realises, and Jamie has them under control.

Malcolm just stands there, reeling slightly, back to the wall. Then he's still.  He gazes at Jamie with an expression that Nicola rightly interprets as fury, overwhelmed by pure relief. Nicola can see all the fight go out of him, exhaustion suddenly predominating in his hands and face and body. He's got what he came for, she thinks, with something slightly like terror.

Nicola feels absolutely sure Jamie won't notice them (he is busy in the maelstrom, shouting political insults and expressing his personal intention of re-laying every cable from here to _fucking civilisation_ using Olly Reeder's spleen, unless they get the phones working right now), but - as many do, but at their peril, she has overlooked Sam. She, not being frightened of psychotic Scotsman or their professional/personal issues (the first item on her job specification), goes directly up to Jamie and taps him on the shoulder.

"Aye, what is it, pet?"

Malcolm is slightly jolted by Jamie's use of the endearment, as much as he's still capable of being jolted by anything.

Sam coughs, discreetly.

Jamie turns round, and Malcolm gets the full force of his grime-encrusted, lunatic face. His eyes widen on seeing Malcolm (Malcolm, it seems, has been turned to stone).

"Jesus Christ, what're you doing here? Malc - " He is over to Malcolm, hand on his arm, rubbing it, and Nicola and Glenn instinctively take a step back. "Glenn, you bollock, get him a chair - jesus, man, you look fucking terrible."

Historians will dispute the precise nature of Jamie's motives, just then. Stupidity? Post-explosive addlement? Selfless stupidity? Or - the subtler but most effective possibility, not that it seemed it, as Malcolm's blue eyes steadily misted over with a fine, grey rage - a calculated attempt to goad Malcolm out of his terrifying, near-catatonic control.

It works.

"We need to have," Malcolm says quietly, "a quiet fucking word."

Jamie, as ever, has the enormous eyes of an owl (though blue), and the apparent stupidity of half a hamster, on acid, when the other half-a-hamster is dead. "Of course," he says, carefully, "but let's get the phones sorted first, yeah? Apparently I'm on some fucking 'missing list', along with Chunky Chops here." He jerks his head towards the PM.

"Percy fucking Weasley can do the phones," starts Malcolm, gathering fury and wheeling on Olly, " - and YOU, you little shit, you'll be feeding through a tube to your fucking kidneys when I'm through, why didn't you come back - "

" - they wouldn't let me leave!" Olly protests, still cowering. "The Loch Ness fucking Monster over there - "  Hamish, the largest and most ginger of Jamie's associates, glints evilly from beneath a layer of dust, " - kept fucking kicking me back down!"

This is entirely plausible, and Malcolm's more than inclined to believe it, but Jamie's touch on his arm has started the shakes again, and he jerks away, sharply, before stalking towards the connecting door. Something in his walk suggests it's a very short-term plan.

Jamie gives him a baffled look but follows, whistling sharply to scatter the few remaining lurkers from the far room. The door slams behind them, and Nicola, Glenn, Sam and Olly try not to look at each other. There is a pause.1

"If you wanted," says Sam, brightly, "you could help untangle these phone lines and put some calls through to London. Nicola," she says kindly, "I brought down a change of clothes for you; they're letting MPs use the vacant bedrooms for showers, and you can borrow my washbag, if it helps."

"Thanks," says Nicola weakly, still looking towards the door. On the other side, the shouting has started. 1 Sam uses the pause to calculate the depth of chaos surrounding the hotel. She can let them have a few minutes alone. It's the only thing Malcolm needs.

\---  
  
INT. CONFERENCE ROOM 2 (DAY)  
  
" - inconsiderate, selfish, fucking deranged _fuckup_." Malcolm finishes, both hands on the desk and screaming his fury at Jamie. "Who do you think you are, Mel Gibson in a fucking anorak? What the fuck were you doing, you fuckin' psycho, holing the PM up in some Mormon corporate hellhole and just not fuckin' mentioned it? You should have called London."

"Hey," says Jamie defensively, skirting round the edge of the desk. "I fucking tried! My Blackberry is somewhere under three thousand tonnes of fucking concrete, every fucking satellite is full of radioactive journalistic shite and if, oh, _if_ you remember, when you came charging in here like - like Jack Sparrow's bald, dead cousin - I was in the process of trying to untangle a fucking landline so I _could_ call London."

"Yeah, not bloody fast enough," Malcolm sneers, clutching the desk-edge harder and trying to ignore the pounding of his heart. "I got from Harrow to Brighton in the time it took you to drive two miles and unwind the bloody phone cord."

Jamie looks decidedly shifty. "Yeah, well, I had some fucking business to attend to. I couldn't exactly walk away."

Malcolm looks horrified. "Are you hurt? Jesus, did they - "

"No! Malc. But there were people in there."

Malcolm runs his hand over his hair and then remembers he doesn't have any. His disbelief is the stuff of epics and Arctic wastelands. "You fucking - you went back in there? Who for? Blinky - you decide to develop a fucking _moral conscience_ the day I - the day a fucking _bombs_ drops on you?"

"A bomb didn't fucking drop on me! I was in a stationery cupboard with Glenn and fucking Biggles. Having a very kinky threeway, or, possibly, trying to work out how to enact all your grand master plans."

"A fucking bomb _did_ drop. It could - " and Malcolm suddenly finds he can't say any more. His fingers worry at the edge of the bandana. Jamie looks incredulous.

"...you didn't seriously - Malc." He's moving closer, ignoring Malcolm's fuck-off body language in favour of the trembling in his back. Malcolm won't meet him halfway but Jamie really doesn't give a shit. " I'm like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust. I'm fucking Teflon. Jesus wept, _Malc_."

He smells of dirt and sweat and chemical fucking warfare, and he's still alive. Malcolm rests his face against Jamie's shoulder, cheek against his neck, hands on his shirt. His eyes are shut, and he says nothing. When Jamie puts his arms around him, he just holds on. Eventually, when spidery fingers find the nape of his neck and stroke there, very gently, Malcolm slumps and lets out a breath.

He still leaves it to Jamie to break the silence. He can't give him that, not now.

"I'm not going to fucking leave you, twat," says Jamie, then, involuntarily, "...this is where I've been for fucking months, while we're on the _fucking_ subject. Where you are with your mental. Every day, thinking you'd.."

"I know," says Malcolm, quietly. There's a pause while Jamie butts his head against Malcolm's fingers, and mutters something that may or may not be 'sweetheart'. Malcolm could fucking kill him for it, and yet he doesn't appear to object.

When Malcolm's fingers come up, yet again, to fuss at the bandana's fretted edges, Jamie frowns. "That looks like it fuckin' itches."

"Yeah," Malcolm admits, worrying at the band above his forehead, more sensitive by the hour.

"Take it off, then," Jamie says, staunchly, and with relief, Malcolm does.

Jamie takes the scarf away and folds it into his jacket pocket. Malcolm rubs his head with relief, revealing the new growth near his temple. In another two weeks, the last cycle begins. Jamie studies the new hair with interest, gazing at it contemplatively long after Malcolm catches him looking.

"No surrender, aye?" Malcolm asks, and Jamie kisses back.

\----

EPILOGUE

INT. RESPIRATORY WARD, BRIGHTON HOSPITAL. (EVE).

"Hi."

Julius's face lights up, when he's stopped being too myopic to recognise her. "Samantha! ...the last time I didn't stand up to greet a lady, Father called me into the study and gave me a most severe talking-to." He smiles. Sam thinks again what a blessing it is Julius must never again deal with the real world.

"I got your message - is everything all right?"

"Ah, yes. This - " he indicates the sheets, the monitors, the monogrammed pyjamas definitely _not_ hospital issue, " - is strictly a precaution. Apparently terrorist aftermath and asthma don't mix."

"You're asthmatic too?"

"You say 'too'? Oh - Malcolm. The cigar, yes, I remember that was when I noticed." A brief pause. "How is he?"

Sam answers calmly. "Lying down. The Marriott's given," _him, not them, HIM, not them_ , " - him a room." _In which he is doing god knows what with Jamie, who has threatened to de-ear him if he doesn't get some rest for a couple of hours._ "I think he's hoping to get back to London before tonight." There is much more she could say, including the fact that Malcolm has chemo tomorrow, and that Jamie hasn't left Malcolm's side for a second since they emerged from the connecting room, Malcolm without his bandana, and with grubby marks on the front of his suit.

Both these secrets would be safe with Julius, but he has this wistful, misguided look on his face when he talks about Malcolm, suggesting that one treacherous, badly-staged kiss might have snatched off some brain cells, along with his soul. So she stops.

"Quite. ....quite. Listen, Samantha," he opens, and Sam does her best, but she can feel disaster approaching. It's not that Julius is at all N.S.I.T. (and anyway, this cubicle is only _curtained_ ), but she does know the signs.

"You were very brave, I hear, at the Mayfair."

Julius blinks, pleased and pink despite himself. "Well, thank you. Although not at all. I mean, only what any, Chatham House Rules and all that. But thank you. Thank you. A terrible day. Young Ben, Nick, dear _dear_ Claire, I - " There is an unnerving pause which she fills, inadequately, with a determined smile. Julius blinks, a little nervously (he has, Sam realises, the very _kindest_ eyes). "Now look, Samantha, I know I'm probably not the sort of chap you want to marry - "

Sam deserves her level of security clearance, but it is only with difficulty that she controls her face. If he gets out his grandmother's ring, she is going to have to faint or call security. If her own mother were here, she'd probably faint with joy. The idea of being Lady Arnage floats briefly before her eyes, in a montage of ponies and pearls and children with receding hairlines.

"No," she says at once, as kindly as she can. And then, because she's worked with Malcolm too long, "But you never know, Seb Moran in Policy might. The one who chairs Stonewall. He's very nice," she says briskly. "And Scottish." That one doesn't have quite the level of briskness she'd wish. "Which I'm not." At his astonished look (first astonished and pink, then astonished and flaming), she smiles, and leans across to squeeze his hand. "I do like you, Julius."

"Then you'll have dinner with me sometimes? At the Connaught?" Oh god, has he not given up? Julius would _like_ Seb. Sam went to Oxford with him. He used to do _ballet_ , for God's sake, _and_ he was in the 1st VIII. "Perhaps every third Friday?"

"Of course," says Sam, wondering if this means she'll have to start drugging Malcolm once a month. But she finds she's smiling. Julius smiles back. Her Blackberry rings. It's Malcolm, ringing-but-hanging-up, his usual signal for 'return to the fold: bodies to bury, buildings to set alight'. She stands.

"Incidentally," says Julius, wriggling up the pillows as a gesture towards rising, "Between you and me, just before the blast, the PM _very definitely said_ he was going to go three weeks after the end of Recess."

Samantha favours him with her most radiant smile. "That's brilliant, Julius. I'll pass it on." She doesn't say that Malcolm's already _told_ the PM he'll be going five days maximum after Parliament reconvenes (it was the last thing he did, before Jamie dragged him upstairs and 'spiked his cocoa with a fucking horse dart', in the words of the aforementioned psycho).

But she appreciates the thought, all the same.

\----  
  
INT. ROOM 463, HOTEL MAYFAIR. (NIGHT)  
  
Malcolm cannot sleep. Jamie's beside him, wearing a new suit couriered from London and playing Star Wars on a laptop forced out of the hotel. He's got the sound down, but provides his own soundtrack via muttered curses, tiny gun noises and occasional whoops of delight. This has nothing to do with why Malcolm can't sleep.

The laptop is making noises much like Malcolm the day before an attack. You could probably fry an egg on its surface. Malcolm deliberates for another second, then reaches out and yanks the cord.

"What the fuck!"

Malcolm glares. "You told them to operate on me."

Jamie actually laughs. "Sorry, was the bit where I got them to save your fucking life a no-no?"

"They said it was too fucking dangerous to risk."

"Yeah, well, I called in a second opinion - "

" - Jesus _Christ_ , do the papers - "

"On the NHS, you colossal, shrunken twat." He puts the laptop to one side, lies down beside him. Malcolm looks wary, as he always does: if they spend much more time _talking_ in bed, their continuing fucked-up altercation will qualify as some sort of jessie relationship. Jamie slides a hand up his flank, which Malcolm removes.

"It'd shrunk. A bit." Malcolm looks very eloquent on the subject of this obvious lie. Jamie sticks his chin out. "They wanted a decision and Sue couldn't be expected to do it. She's an actual human being. It'd be like asking - "  Trying and failing to name another human being, he falls silent. Malcolm realises he's no better off. Jamie puts his hand back on Malcolm's leg. "Anyway. I did a good thing. An excellent thing."

"A fucking dangerous thing. Squeezy lemons, remember." He hesitates. "And it could come back."

"It fucking won't. It knows I'd just save your fucking life again if it tried. So shut up, you auld cunt, get to sleep." He lies down, tugs the duvet up, closes his eyes. Malcolm stares.

"Why the fuck you think I'll sleep any better with you breathing sewage in my ear," Malcolm mutters, partly because he genuinely hates the loss of space that comes with sharing a double bed, and partly because he suspects he'll pass out the second Jamie does. "Do you think you just _ended this discussion_?"

"Aye. Postponed it, at a bare fucking minimum. Come on, Malc, get tae fuck. Sleep." 

"I come back the day Hugh Grant there resigns."

Jamie doesn't open his eyes. "Statement or question?"

"Fucking notice to clear my beautiful desk of your junkie flotsam." Malcolm sighs. "And move back to your own, of course."

Jamie snorts. "Never fucking doubted it," he smirks, and settles, drawing him in with great smugness. "Never doubted anything."

"You're a fucking liar," Malcolm mutters, fondly, and falls asleep first.

END.


End file.
